ORAL HISTORY OF ROBERT PAUL SCHWEIKHER

Interviewed by Betty J. Blum

Compiled under the auspices of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of Architecture The Art Institute of Chicago

Copyright © 1984 Revised Edition © 2000 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface to Revised Edition iv

Outline of Topics vii

Oral History 1

Biographical Profile 215

Selected References 217

Index of Names and Buildings 219

iii PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

It has been more than fifteen years since I met with Paul Schweikher (1903-1997) in his butte-top home in Sedona, Arizona, to record his recollections. His oral history was the Department of Architecture's pilot project, the first in what we hoped would become a one- of-a-kind collection of oral histories and interviews with Chicago architects. Today this unique data bank contains more than sixty-five transcriptions and is regularly consulted by scholars and students locally through the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and worldwide via the Art Institute’s web page. At this time we are receiving frequent requests from American as well as international sources for information and excerpts from Schweikher's oral history. To better serve the increased research needs of today, we have revisited our original presentation and have reformatted the text to read more easily and accurately and have corrected typographical errors. The index and outline of topics have expanded and repaginated, the original bibliographic source list has been revised to pertain more closely to topics Schweikher speaks about, and a biographical profile has been added. Apart from these front and back matter revisions, nothing in the text has been altered. We trust that the user will find the Schweikher’s narrative more accessible because of these changes.

In four consecutive sessions in July, 1984, Paul and I recorded thirteen and one-half hours of his memories of the events and people who he encountered in the course of his long multi- faceted career. The interview was taped on 9 ninety-minute cassettes and the transcription follows the order of the recordings except for three small portions recorded on tape nine that have been inserted, and are so indicated, in the body of the text where they are most relevant. References to published material mentioned in the text are listed in the attached references whenever known. The transcription has been minimally edited to maintain the spirit, tone and flow of Schweikher's original testimony.

This oral history has provided data for interpretative material in a brochure, Architecture in Context: The Avant-Garde in Chicago's Suburbs, that accompanied an exhibition by the same name, of Schweikher's drawings at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in 1984. Excerpts from Schweikher's oral history have been published in Inland Architect (November/December 1984), as well as quoted in the United States Department of

iv the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form in 1986 requesting that Schweikher’s home and studio be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, a distinction that it was granted. Today, with the ease of communication with computers and through the Internet, scholars worldwide have expressed a renewed interest in the career of an almost-forgotten practitioner and educator who defies classification.

For those wanting to consult more material about Paul Schweikher, in addition to this oral history, architectural drawings and research material are at The Art Institute of Chicago; manuscript material is located at Syracuse University; additional drawings are located at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff; and a photographic file is available at the Chicago Historical Society in the Hedrich-Blessing Archive.

It is with appreciation that today I remember and thank Paul Schweikher, whose willingness to share his lifetime of recollections with candor and imagination made our many hours of recording a pleasant and memorable experience for me, and his wife and constant companion, Dorothy, whose quiet support and encouragement was ever present. This appreciation is tinged with sadness because Paul and Dorothy have both died in the interim. To Kai Bergin, our transcriber, we are grateful for the care and understanding with which she transcribed the recordings using the modest equipment of fifteen years ago. To Annemarie van Roessel, my colleague, who has coordinated all phases of the revision: scanning, repagination, reformatting, providing access on the Art Institute of Chicago's web page with exceptional skill, perception and judgment, go my sincere appreciation and thanks. We are grateful to the Illinois Humanities Council and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this endeavor.

Betty J. Blum April 2000

v OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Experiences That Led to a Career in Architecture 1 Arrival in Chicago, 1922 7 Impression of Chicago and the Art Institute 8 Employment in the Office of Lowe and Bollenbacher, 1923-1925 11 Parsons Atelier 14 Employment in the Office of Russell Walcott, 1928 19 Employment in the Office of David Adler, 1925-1927 22 Study at Yale 38 Influences: Sheppard Stevens and Otto Faelton 41 Friendship with Ted Lamb 51 Buckminster Fuller 53 Employment in the Office of Philip Maher, 1931-1933 55 Designing Furniture for the Chicago Workshop: Lee Atwood and Marianne Willisch 59 Charles Eliason House and the MoMA Exhibition, 1933 63 Solar Studies with George Fred Keck 67 Opinion of the American Institute of Architects 69 AIA Architects' Balls 73 Schools and Ateliers in Chicago 75 Work Published in Architectural Journals 78 Designing for Industry, 1930s 81 Century of Progress, 1933-1934: Employment by General Houses 82 Partnership with Ted Lamb Including the General Electric Home Competition, 1935 87 Dushkin House and Studio, 1936 92 Political Sympathies in the 1930s and Military Service 96 Moholy-Nagy and Roundtable Talks at the Tavern Club 100 Clubs that Chicago Architects Favored 102 Mies van der Rohe, the Farnsworth House and Lawsuit 109 Travel in Japan, 1937, and Its Influence on Schweikher's Work 120 Roselle Home and Studio, 1938 122 Rinaldo House, Downers Grove, 1940 127 Glenview Co-operative Community, 1938-1941 131

vi Civic Design Committee, 1941 137 33rd Division Project 138 Influences on Schweikher's Work 141 Great Lakes Officers Housing, 1942 145 Lewis House, Park Ridge, 1940 147 Architectural Jury at the Arizona Biltmore Including a Visit to Taliesin West 150 Travel in Mexico, 1941 155 Schweikher and Elting Reorganize Their Firm 160 Unique Features of Schweikher's Houses and His Philosophy 166 International Congress of Modern Architecture 174 Several Projects 175 Structural Clay Products Exhibition House, 1950, and Dispute with the AIA 179 Frazel House, Wayne, Illinois: Miesian Influence and Mies 181 While at Yale 183 Maryville College Campus Buildings, Maryville, Tennessee 196 Move to Carnegie Mellon 198 H. D. Davis Rockwell House, Flossmoor, 1952 200 Influence on and Advice to Young Architects 202 Duquesne University: Buildings by Schweikher and Mies, 1962 204 Comparison of Craig Wright House, 1967, with Roselle Home and Studio, 1938 208 Reflections 210 Location of Schweikher’s Archival Materials, Photographs, and Drawings 213

vii Robert Paul Schweikher

Blum: Today is July 6, 1984, and I'm with Paul Schweikher in his home in Sedona, Arizona. Mr. Schweikher, you were born in 1903 in Denver. What was there in your early years that helped you decide to become an architect?

Schweikher: I think these replies, any replies, may be short because... Well, let me start over again. I would first have to ask what you mean by “early years”.

Blum: Well, I suppose I consider your early years those years prior to college. Was your father an architect?

Schweikher: My father was a musician, not a composer, but an instrumentalist on the piano and the organ. He was completely devoted to music. My mother, as well, was a soloist. I can think of nothing in the Western Institute of Music and Dramatic Art that would have acted as, or become, or been any introduction to architecture. No.

Blum: During your early years where did you think you were headed, career-wise?

Schweikher: When I got to the point of thinking about it at all—which was probably in my first year of college at the University of Colorado—I chose, wisely or unwisely, the profession of engineering, with an emphasis not on structure, which might have been an inkling of architecture, but on electric engineering. I soon found, I think, that there was no road there for me, both in terms of interest and of difficulty. There was no prodding interest to overcome the mathematical and theoretical ramifications that electrical engineering seemed to have in store. I did poorly at the university in mathematics and paid very little attention to the theoretical part. It was a pleasant sociable

1 year in which I met Dorothy, my wife to be.

Blum: Was she in electrical engineering?

Schweikher: No. She went to the University of Denver and for some reason or other we were at the same party—I think it was a fraternity party—and I met her there. I realize, Betty, that I'm not freewheeling and this will take perhaps a little while, but if you want me to pursue this further...

Blum: Well, what I'd like to know is how, from a musical family, you went into electrical engineering and somehow wound up in architecture.

Schweikher: Perhaps there was a time back, way back... Perhaps there was something on my father's mind that prompted him to buy me all the available sets of Anchor blocks. Now if people don't know the Anchor blocks it's hard to define them other than to say that they were many colored—most were white, red and blue—and of many shapes and they came with prepared drawings showing how they could be put together into a variety of designs. As I think back on them I have no knowledge of what happened to the design books. I wish I still had them, but I don't. They were probably Victorian in spirit.

Blum: How old were you when he gave you this?

Schweikher: I must have been all of five or six, I think, because I drew... There were some white, round stone cylinders. The dimensions of these things were somewhere in the neighborhood of one inch to two inches in any given direction and fractions thereof. The white cylinders fitted well into little circles or arches made to receive them. I added my part by drawing quite inaccurate designs of clocks, which then prompted a place to be designed, such as a tower, to hold the clock. That I remember as a beginning, towers without buildings but with clocks. That's quite matter of fact. This was followed later—not much time went by, I guess, as I continued with the

2 Anchor blocks—with some drawing. I did lots of drawing, but of the scribbley type. Nothing very promising as I think of it now. I would draw on anything. But it was sometime later—maybe three or four years after that, if I'm not rushing it too much—when what was known as the Mechano set came out.

Blum: What was the Mechano set?

Schweikher: Mechano was made out of rather heavy gauge steel, perforated so that steel plates and steel ribs could be put together with nuts and bolts, little brass nuts and bolts. The plates were steel. It was very popular for quite a few years and my father kept adding to the set. You could build bridges and so on.

Blum: Is this similar to a child's Erector set?

Schweikher: That led to the Erector set. I don't know the history of it, but the Erector came after the Mechano and ultimately, as far as I can understand it, replaced it. I think what the Erector did was to eliminate the nuts and bolts. They found ways of pressing the various members together.

Blum: Did you enjoy the Anchor blocks and the drawing?

Schweikher: I enjoyed the end result. I didn't like the labor connected with it and I know that that was always something troublesome. Not that I minded the work, but I was not capable of handling the material.

Blum: Because your manual dexterity was not developed enough?

Schweikher: Well, I was just too young. I was sorry to see the Anchor blocks falling off in my own esteem. There was something happening to what I could see in actual architecture that was not represented in what I could produce in Anchor blocks. I think that's where my interest fell away and the Anchor

3 blocks must have been preserved by my father, not by me, because they suddenly found themselves in very orderly arrangements in trays which have been kept that way ever since. I gave them to my son to use and he played with them, but during war periods toy soldiers were of more interest to him, I guess, than Anchor blocks. Now they are carefully preserved with the expectation that maybe my grandson will be interested in them. I'm waiting for his father's approval to turn them over to him. The Mechano set gave way to the popularity of the Erector set, which I never owned because my father disdained it. He thought they were poorly made and cheaply made so he wouldn't buy any Erector sets. I had to turn my interests actually away from architecture instead of toward it, but by this time other things had happened in the family. About the time that I reached college age we had an automobile accident in which my father was killed. And all this while, of course, I had a brother who sort of borrowed a little bit from this—he was seven years younger than I, or six and a half—but his interests didn't ever solidify. I think perhaps that they were not allowed to solidify because of our parents. The other thing that must have been strongly in my father's mind was that at least one of his two sons, his only children, should become a musician. He was too rough a teacher for me to study under; his anger at my poor performances was enough to disrupt my progress on the piano, so I was turned over to a violin teacher and I studied with him for two or three years. Not very much to my father's satisfaction, I didn't develop very rapidly. I certainly had no great promise in that direction because I didn't move very rapidly. My brother took up the piano, and then of course the death of my father stopped all of that. My brother went to work in one direction and I went to work in another.

Blum: Why did you decide on electrical engineering for your college years, at least in Denver?

Schweikher: Only I think there's nothing to explain it. I just feel those formative years were just grabbing at straws. At the time when I didn't need to, when my father was still alive, I was permitted my own choice. Because I was bored

4 with music—it was around me everywhere—instead of responding to it, I wanted to get away from it and it wasn't masculine enough. I wanted to play football and be an athlete and I was about as athletic as the backyard clothes pole and not capable of being an athlete except under the strongest kind of discipline. And my father wasn't ready for that. I just grew up as a great many people did, I think, without any particular professional direction, I should say.

Blum: Did you spend one year or two at the University of Denver? Was it 1921 through 1922?

Schweikher: It wasn't the University of Denver. I spent one year in the liberal arts section of the University of Colorado. That was primarily an engineering school at that time. The liberal arts section was very small. At that time I may have had as a major, if one can have a major his freshman year, chemistry. I was poor at that and quickly lost interest. This was, however, after the automobile accident.

Blum: Then you were at the University of Colorado for one year?

Schweikher: That was one year. I didn't do well. I was a C student all the way through.

Blum: Now was this your engineering experience?

Schweikher: It was in an engineering school but I took the weakest of the courses which was liberal arts, leaving me actually without a strong choice in any direction.

Blum: What else did you study? What other classes did you take?

Schweikher: Mostly chemistry and English. I did very well in English. So that was the end of that, at the end of that period in my life.

5 Blum: Why did you leave Denver and come to Chicago?

Schweikher: Dorothy left Denver. She knew exactly what she wanted to do and be and she became a laboratory technician. She was at the University of Denver and undoubtedly a good student. She was a gold medal student in her high school days—they gave them out at Des Moines, which is where she came from. I thought she was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. She left Denver to find employment in Chicago, because an aunt of hers, who I think owned and ran a medical laboratory, had invited her. So she left Denver and met her Chicago aunt and I soon followed her there. My mother had to seek employment and she found it in a music school where she was the assistant to the director. Then I felt that I could leave.

Blum: So you left your family in Colorado?

Schweikher: I left my mother and my brother and I went to Chicago with the idea that art was for me.

Blum: Art in what form?

Schweikher: I didn't know. I want to backtrack for just a moment. Where was I?

Blum: I think you were about to talk about something that may have influenced you in the direction of becoming an architect.

Schweikher: That is the summer experience in Denver. I had failed to mention the afternoon and evening work in an old brownstone, but a very fine brownstone, in the Capital Hill district of Denver. I studied under Bernie Hoyt, who was the designer and architect of the open-air amphitheater located in the Garden of the Gods in or near Colorado Springs, not too far west of Denver. Bernie undoubtedly did many other important projects but there was one I remember even better than the amphitheater. The project I most remember was one I saw in a monograph that contained the winners

6 and high placement people of the then-famous Paris Prize competition for excellence in architecture in the United States. Actually, Bernie Hoyt—I failed to mention this the first time I went through it—placed second for three years in a row but never won the Paris Prize. On the other hand, I think I was so impressed by the magnificence of the drawing of this third project of his that I couldn't shake it from my mind and I'm sure that it must have left some impression of the romance of architecture.

Blum: So with that experience, having met an architect first-hand...

Schweikher: Well, that experience was of course dulled somewhat by my working as an apprentice repairing meters for the Denver Gas and Electric Light Company, as it was called in those days, for the rest of each day during the summer. Then at the end of that summer I went to Chicago.

Blum: And you arrived in Chicago in 1922, ready to dedicate yourself to art?

Schweikher: I arrived not ready for art but really seeking the means to do things that might become important to me. I think I was simply looking for a job, in other words. I had come armed with a letter from an old friend of my father's, a vice-president of one of the local banks, addressed to Mr. Charles G. Dawes, explaining the virtues of this young man. It was a short letter and quickly read. So Mr. Dawes said, “Take him to the chief clerk.” So off I went with whomever it was conducting me to the chief clerk of the Central Trust Company who actually sat on a very high stool in front of a ledger. The clerk looked down on me and said, “I understand that I'm to hire you and you will take book number something-or-other”—I can't remember the number of the book—and I was then taken a little further into the back of the cages in the bank. There was row upon row of very high desks reached only by high stools. On the desks rested Boston ledgers. If anyone doesn't know what a Boston ledger was I'm not sure that I can give an impressive picture of it. It was a book that was perhaps two feet in height and possibly three to four feet in double spread with twenty to thirty

7 rows for figures and you had an ink pen and an inkwell up in the upper right hand corner of the desk to work with.

Blum: It sounds a little like Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Schweikher: Yes, it certainly was in every respect. Any kind of picture of Dickens would have fit exactly. So you're perched on the top of the highest stool and you've got the pen with a very fine nib and your inkwell and the checks began to come in from the tellers’ cages, not singly, but in great bundles as many as 200 and 300 per bundle. You learned the technique of fingering these down for a reading and writing them into either the debit or the credit column. We were doing the whole operation of adding and subtracting and dividing all in one operation, putting them all into another column, taking the balance for the day, and seeing if you came out without error. So I spent one whole winter there for reasons that weren't clear other than that Chicago at that time was, to my ears, a rip-roaring place physically, outdoors. In the Loop the sound of rivet hammers was pervasive.

Blum: What was being built that you recall?

Schweikher: I don't recall what was being built.

Blum: What was it that the rivet hammers were doing?

Schweikher: I think the Straus Building and the Wrigley Building perhaps were being finished. The Tribune Tower competition had not taken place. Perhaps they were building 333 North Michigan Avenue. Sullivan's buildings were already standing, although I came to know them as Sullivan's buildings later. Richardson's warehouse was already standing.

Blum: Did it interest you to see those buildings go up?

Schweikher: Not much. I didn't have the time for that, I think. In the first place I was

8 usually running between banks, or running for lunch, or to the elevated, or to the train. Time was always short. But my other point of interest then was to meet Dorothy at the entrance to the Art Institute. That took up a good part of the art interest, but it wasn't a heavy interest in architecture and this is partly I suppose because of Dorothy's interest and influence. She would call attention to things that were not necessarily architectural. What happened was that she took a course in watercolor, an evening class, and persuaded me that I could work that in with my banking. So I would meet her after her work at the IC station, she'd come down, we'd meet on the steps of the Art Institute, look for the nearest BG for a sandwich, and then go back for an evening class in the Art Institute school where she studied watercolor. I began in that class and then noticed that there were people sitting at drafting boards in a room that I passed. I went into that room one evening. I had done very well in high school in Denver in mechanical drawing so I thought maybe I should start somewhere where I had a little strength, rather than trying to dip brushes into watercolor. I talked to the man there, whose name no longer is in my mind, and he turned out to be an employee of Howard Van Doren Shaw. He said that he had plenty of room. Well, it looked as though he did. He had a big room with lots of tables and about five or six students. He didn't seem very interested in his work and he didn't seem to draw very well with a brush but he started me anyway with a T-square and triangle drawing a gazebo in a garden. The only thing I could recall was out in the area that I had lived in Denver. I had to start with something and so I started with what I suppose one might call today an Italianate style. It had an arch in it, anyway. I didn't know how to recreate a column of any order or class but it had an arch or two in it and I managed to get up to a kind of parapet. On top of that I put a sloped tile roof, which was next to impossible for me to draw. I spent the rest of the class trying to draw one tile and I got the final approval of this man. But by this time I was thoroughly tired of the class and didn't gain anything in architecture by it. I didn't gain any incentive, I didn't gain any appreciation, it was simply an experience. The drafting experience was never exploited because instead of using the tools to recreate plans, sections and elevations,

9 they were used to delineate a design, which never quite evolved. So it was the end of my Art Institute days, except that meanwhile we were also more and more aware of the many things offered in the Art Institute and the variety of the collections. We came to love the string quartets, which we couldn't leave alone on Sundays. I don't know whether they still continue them or not.

Blum: No, unfortunately.

Schweikher: But a little group of the people from the Chicago Symphony kept that going for a number of years. Dorothy and I were very faithful attendants.

Blum: Did you discover the Burnham Library's collection of architectural drawings and architectural books?

Schweikher: I think I did discover the Burnham Library, but again not very intelligently. I can't give a nice intelligent, informed, enthusiastic direction. All of it seemed to be just the wandering of a not very alert person. You asked me about the impression of the noise Chicago had. Well, Chicago was a bustling place and I must have felt somewhere that architecture was important because after getting the job as bookkeeper I began to walk around on late afternoons, or perhaps even spending a Saturday, looking around to see if I could find some employment in drafting rather than in architecture. I wouldn't say that it had to be architecture, but somehow I was directed, whether this was in an advertisement or a publication, I’m not sure. I think it goes back to my instructor from Howard Shaw's office who gave me some names of architects. Howard Van Doren Shaw was one, but I also had the name of Benjamin Marshall, if that is correct. At any rate, I came to an office that was quite ornate and seemed to be rather empty of personnel and people, although it had many tables. After some waiting, a man who was not very tall came out in what looked like a Parisian cape—it was a light working garment of some kind and he was wearing a very flowing black tie and with long hair, about as long as mine now—and spoke to me

10 rather quickly and tartly. He said, “We're not busy now but I suggest that you go talk to a friend of mine. He's over in another part of town.” The friend was Edward Probst of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White. So I went over and I found Probst right away, looking across a sea of tables with people bent over them; it was frightening. I spoke to him about wanting a job and he asked what experience I had, and of course, I had none. He said, “Well, office-boy work would be the only thing we could use you for at this time.” Well, I was willing to do that. He said, “Well, we can rig you up with a table, but before we do that why don't you find a smaller office. The best place to begin is in a smaller office.” “Well, yes,” I said, “maybe I should start somewhere else.” I thought I'd never get anywhere in such a place as that. He said, “Well, I have one in mind. I think you could talk to a Mr. Venning at Lowe and Bollenbacher in the Womens Temple Building on LaSalle Street.” When I got to the Womens Temple Building it was one that I had seen a good bit of the time; its structure had interested me. It was stone and topped with rather handsome pointed skylights and when I went up to the office I was surprised to find that I had stepped into the office and there was one of the skylights. That attracted me, and there must have been maybe eight tables in the office and a secretary, Miss Enk. She said, “Well, Mr. Venning isn't here right now but I think Mr. Bollenbacher might talk to you.” I can't remember now whether it was Bollenbacher or Lowe—I guess it actually turned out to be Lowe that I talked to, he was the eldest of the group—Lowe hired me right away, no questions. He said, “Yes, you can come to work.”

Blum: Why do you think he hired you?

Schweikher: I think only my interest as a young fellow must have impressed him. I was young and I was curious and I was interested. I was a nice young man, which was about all I could ever say of myself. I had no way of approaching him intellectually or as a matter of professional interest. There was nothing that I could have explained, I had no skill whatsoever. I was like many a failure of the day; I was willing to do anything.

11 Blum: What were you hired to do?

Schweikher: He said, “Well, you will be our office boy.” I can't remember what time of year, but I think it must have been getting toward the chillier part of the year because I had to clean the pigeon dung off the skylight in the lower panes. I didn't have to climb the whole skylight, but only where it interfered with the process of making blueprints. This is too long technically to explain; those who can recall any of those early beginnings know what I mean. Then it followed the idea of taking drawings up onto the skylight for printing with the sensitized paper when the sun was shining. That was one job. The other was, of course, to sweep up a little bit at the end of the day so it'd be ready for morning work. Another was, of course, also to file drawings, not correspondence, in a vault that had already been built for that purpose. That was a progressive office. I progressed in the office from doing that work to filling in outlines on full-sized details with a pale wash of Chinese ink so that it could be read as a section. Those were usually made full-size and they were printable. They went off to a commercial printer, because they were very big and they had to be run off on a roll. I was then later assigned some simple tasks as a racer tracing in ink on linen, tracing working drawings. I stayed there, I guess, for two and a half years. By this time I was beginning to know and talk under Venning. Venning was a designer and very sensitive and very interested in the development of young people. The firm was growing and inside of a year Lowe must have become sick. I didn't hear, or see, or know what happened, but Lowe ceased to be in the office and suddenly a new face appeared; that person was Alfred Granger and then the office became Granger and Bollenbacher. Granger had apparently had come from Frost and Granger. Frost in turn had come from Perkins and Frost, I believe. Perkins and Frost had something to do with railway stations. I stayed through that whole early period with Granger and Bollenbacher, becoming a detailer, never a designer. Another experience given to me by Bollenbacher was to supervise construction. I was an architectural superintendent, which meant that I

12 wasn't there all day long on the job but would visit various projects, some of which were going up right in the city on the South Side. We did a number of what I thought were very well done Gothic churches, of Venning's design, in limestone. Venning was very good and these were pretty straight imitations of the English country church. We did quite a few of those and then the firm got probably their largest work—I guess perhaps at least during the time I was with them—doing a dormitory for the University of Indiana. That was done in Collegiate Gothic. At some point I began to feel my oats, or whatever it was they say about horses, and I began to get sassy. I wasn't fired, but I felt uncomfortable in the office—there were new personnel.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Blum: Did you say you began to dislike the work?

Schweikher: Donald Nelson was a fellow beginner and he had become one of the employees. Donald was awarded a fellowship shortly after that to MIT and after about two or three years study he won the Paris Prize under Jacques Carlu.

Blum: You said that the office was a small one. How small was it?

Schweikher: I always had a small office. I think a small office to me would be anything under twenty draftsmen.

Blum: Was that the size of the office of Lowe and Bollenbacher, under twenty?

Schweikher: Yes, even as we increased. We grew under Granger, took new offices, and moved from the Womens Temple Building into the Railway Exchange Building, I think. I may be wrong about that. Was there a Stock Exchange Building before the Holabird and Root building that went up at the end of LaSalle Street? There may have been, and it may have been into that

13 building that we moved. But it was to larger offices in which we had perhaps eight to ten draftsmen. I think I didn't like that atmosphere and I was still sentimental about the old office and I told Venning that I ought to look around a little bit. He then said, “I'll speak to John Leavell.” I thought, “Well, who is he?” “John Leavell is head draftsman for David Adler,” he said, “that's a fine office. I think you might be happy there.” I said, “Oh I wish you would.” It couldn't have been more than a day or two that Venning came and said, “Go see John Leavell.” He must have done a fine selling job because by the time I got to John Leavell, John said, “Fine. You're in. Come on, we need draftsmen.” I began my work then. In that office perhaps the most notable person was Freddie Ahlson.

Blum: Freddie Ahlson is a person whose name I've come across in relation with the Parsons Atelier.

Schweikher: Yes. I haven't mentioned Parsons, that's true.

Blum: Or your connection to the atelier system. Did you have any?

Schweikher: I was in that in the early part and I remember some names. Parsons was certainly the one who seemed to be—what did we call him in those days?—”the massier.” He was not there every night but was there perhaps once a week to give criticism. Now was Parsons of Bennett, Parsons and Frost? Was that the Parsons? All right. I saw him perhaps once or twice. I had no particular history there. I remember Ahlson being involved and preoccupied with a competition to qualify as a possible entrant to MIT, which I think he won. He and I had also entered the yearly competitions for traveling scholarships in the atelier but neither one of us won, although Ahlson came very close to winning. The atelier history under Parsons went on. I spent many of my evenings there. Meanwhile I had been married so that there wasn't the matter of trying to find the time and room to see a girlfriend when my wife was reasonably safe at home. And so I did that kind of evening study quite frequently. By this time—although it was

14 without any strong influence; there was no apparition appearing saying, “You're destined for architecture!” and maybe that should have been my warning—I was immersed, completely captivated, and talked nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing but architecture.

Blum: Were you friendly with other young aspiring architects?

Schweikher: Yes, I was most friendly with those that stayed with me during the day. I didn't make many new acquaintances at the atelier, mostly because, number one, we were in competition with one another, and number two, the time was short, especially when the charette came—charette was from the French on-the-cart kind of thing where you had to produce. You had a day and a night and the days were filled with employment and the nights were filled with work. You slept on your drafting board and you got up and you went to work the next day and you came right back to your drafting board, but you loved it, you loved every minute of it. You didn't particularly love or like or feel close to the other people that were working there, at least I didn't. I did find that there was perhaps one year there in the atelier when I guess I was fairly devoted because I was frequently the only one asleep there on the drafting board at night. Not many people did that but once or twice Ahlson would do it, but he and I were about the only people who really put it out.

Blum: Was that Frederick Ahlson?

Schweikher: Fred Ahlson, right.

Blum: Who were some of the other people who were there with you?

Schweikher: Well, there was an Eiseman I believe. I think there were two Eisemans. Young Al worked for David Adler and I think his brother had worked for David Adler too. What happened to his brother, who was older, taller, and easier to get along with, I can't quite remember. Al Eiseman I found a most

15 disagreeable person until much, much, later when I was already in practice and he came to visit us once and I then found him a mature, fine, quiet, easy person. But he was a quarrelsome, foul mouthed kind of a person when I knew him at David Adler's, so I never saw much of him. His brother went somewhere else, leaving Ahlson and me and…

Blum: His brother's name is Ferdinand.

Schweikher: That was Ferdinand, he was the elder brother.

Blum: He was the 1924 winner of the foreign traveling scholarship and went to Rome.

Schweikher: Oh that's very possible. 1924, I see. Well, where was I in 1924? I was right there, I guess. 1924. Or I hadn't arrived there yet, or something.

Blum: No, this sheet from the Illinois Society of Architects Bulletin of January 1924 shows that you were participating in many of the problems that were presented at atelier.

Schweikher: I must not have known him very well. I think he was in Adler's office. He must have left Adler's office about the time that I came there, because I didn't see any more of Ferdinand. I liked Ferdinand but I didn't like his brother Al.

Blum: Can we back up for one minute? Something very important happened in 1922, the year you arrived in Chicago, and that was the Tribune Tower competition. How did that affect you?

Schweikher: I didn't know enough.

Blum: Were you aware of it?

16 Schweikher: Yes, I was aware of it. Our scholarship came up that year in 1922. I was one of the performers. I don't know whether I'm written down there. I was one of the performers in the 1922 competition—by this time we were out on 1800 Prairie Avenue. We were out there and I guess Parsons may have been in charge, but maybe it was somebody else than Parsons, I can't remember—it was a person that I never ever saw as far as I know. I did my work and I got a First Mention award, I have it here pictorially in a Beaux Arts Bulletin. Did I ever show you the bulletins?

Blum: I was asking about the 1922 Tribune Tower competition.

Schweikher Oh yes. Was that the year of the Saarinen thing? Ahlson was very impressed by Saarinen, the Saarinen solution, which came in late. I was plodding along. I wasn't ready for that kind of thing, which was pretty modern for me. I was just getting used to the idea that there was something wrong, something impure, about doing a Gothic interpretation of a commercial building. I was struggling with that. Gothic architecture was just beginning to get into the argument about it being applied to manufacturing buildings and so on and so on. So I didn't respond to that. Ahlson responded by doing his scholarship, which was a skyscraper. I think he followed the Tribune program but he didn't do a very good solution. Then there was a man—who unknown to us who worked at that time for Schmidt, Garden, Erikson—whose name I think was Hoffmeister.

Blum: Ted Hoffmeister?

Schweikher: Ted Hoffmeister. Ahlson kept saying, “He's the one that's going to win it.” He had done his entry very much like Rossi, this was a stark building of rectangular windows, it went up indefinitely. Ahlson said, “That's the winner beyond a doubt.” I think there was a big long discussion. I don't know who won. I spent, I remember, one night there. I was still there at night working on my solution and David Adler came in and tried to help me. I felt lost and I think he took one look at me and thought I was lost.

17 Blum: I think I'm lost.

Schweikher: Did I lose you? I was working on the same project and I took it into the office. The locations move. I was out on Prairie and I was working on it, Ahlson was working on it, and Hoffmeister was working on it. Well, Hoffmeister and Ahlson were in a class all by themselves.

Blum: Was this an entry for the Tribune competition?

Schweikher: No, but it was a program based on the Tribune Tower competition and just copying. Showing only how far ahead of me Ahlson was at that time, I realized afterwards that Ahlson was so right about Hoffmeister. But it took me a year to know that. I don't think Hoffmeister got it either because I think he was considered too modern. I don't know whether Freddie got it or not.

Blum: Where was the competition held?

Schweikher: This was held on Prairie Avenue—the Chicago Atelier I think it was called.

Blum: Now was that based on the 1922 Tribune competition?

Schweikher: Right. It was at about the same time and was based on that same program.

Blum: How did you feel about Hood's solution, the one that was actually built?

Schweikher: I thought it was a fine prizewinner. Then I got to thinking. I was bounced around by other opinions. I had no opinion of my own. I began to hear those who said, “Yes, but how about Gothic architecture? Gothic architecture was developed in France for churches. How about church architecture for industrial buildings?” I got mixed up, as Philip Johnson never did, because Philip Johnson studied logic first, architecture second, so

18 Philip was never fooled by such things. He would simply have said, “Why not?”

Blum: But that caused you some conflict?

Schweikher: Yes, it caused me conflict, that was just part of an early conflict.

Blum: Am I correct to understand that Lowe and Bollenbacher did a lot of Gothic churches?

Schweikher: Yes that’s right. Now you may have to tie some of these dates together.

Blum: The dates I have for your employment by Lowe and Bollenbacher are 1923 to 1925.

Schweikher: I was certainly employed by Lowe and Bollenbacher at the time that I was going out to the atelier.

Blum: Did the atelier meet at night?

Schweikher: Yes, it was almost always night work or, of course, a weekend. You could work Saturday and Sunday, or Saturday afternoons. Most of us were employed in the mornings.

Blum: Were you, or anyone who was involved in the atelier activities, aware of the Bauhaus ideas at that time?

Schweikher: No, I wasn't aware of the Bauhaus until another moment that sort of fills a hiatus. When I graduated from Yale, which was 1929 or maybe it was as early as 1928, I worked one summer with Russell Walcott. I had meanwhile spent two years with David Adler. Then went back to Yale to graduate. After I graduated from Yale, I spent nearly a year in Europe with Dorothy, and came back to work briefly again with Russ Walcott. It was at that

19 point that Lee Atwood put in a strong appearance to me and Lee said, “Have you seen this?” and brought it to my attention one day. This was Mies's Barcelona Pavilion. This is just before I had gone to Europe and I said, '“No, I have not.” He said, “Isn't it beautiful? Who would dare to put a flat roof over that space?” We both studied it more and more and we were ready for Mies when we finally heard from the horse's mouth that “God is in the details.” Then I was going to look it up. I thought, I want to go to Germany and see where it is. I understood it had been put away in a museum somewhere in a warehouse. I never did track it down; even Vincent Scully couldn't find it.

Blum: Was that when you became aware of Mies and the Bauhaus?

Schweikher: Yes, it was under Lee Atwood's guidance. Lee was a single man in a rather obscure office of Russ Walcott and I had gone there and worked. I couldn't really go back to David Adler's, it was plodding along but the jobs were all pretty well prescribed and there wasn't any new ground there.

Blum: This was in 1927?

Schweikher: Probably, that's roughly the year.

Blum: So it was after two years of work with David Adler that you went to Russ Walcott?

Schweikher: Yes, Russ Walcott follows David Adler. I went work for Russ Walcott before I went to Europe.

Blum: After Yale or during Yale?

Schweikher: This was after Yale.

Blum: So maybe it was later than 1927. It could have been 1928.

20 Schweikher: I would say yes.

Blum: Who else was in Russell Walcott's office?

Schweikher: There was a man, I think it was Dave Hinkley, who was the head draftsman. There was Ted Samuelson. He had already been in David Adler's office and he must have followed me to Russ Walcott's office. I think he was in Russ Walcott's office. There was Lee Atwood. And there was a superintendent whose name has long gone out of my head.

Blum: Was this another small office?

Schweikher: It was much smaller than David Adler's. Adler's was a small office but this was even smaller.

Blum: How did you go from David Adler's office to Russ Walcott's?

Schweikher: I was afraid to go back to David Adler's office, I remember, because I was in my senior year at Yale and I was so heavily loaded down. I came back to spend the Christmas holidays working for David Adler and suddenly I realized that I had an exam due. I think it was about a day and a half away. I left a note to Johnny Gregg—John Gregg Allerton he became later—and to John Leavell saying, “I've just realized that I've forgotten all about an exam. I've got to be there. My graduation depends on it. I won't be in tomorrow.” Well I was right in the middle of a project for the Dillinghams at that time and I really let them down. Apparently Adler was quite angry about it. He and I had had a couple of things which, as I explained in the book [David Adler by Richard Pratt, 1970], there were a couple of times in which I guess he thought that I wasn't too reliable.

Blum: How did you get that job in Russell Walcott's office?

21 Schweikher: I don't know, just walking up Michigan Boulevard I guess. I must have heard about him somehow. Walcott was known to me. I just got the job myself. I don't think that I had met Atwood until after I got to Walcott's office. Walcott was a name I think John Leavell may have told me about. John Leavell may have told me because it's getting pretty vague right in through there. At any rate, I think I got the job just by myself. I went up and walked in and talked to Walcott himself and told him I was from David Adler's office and that I was looking for a job. He hired me right away because he was a great admirer of David Adler's. Do you know his work? Do you remember any of his work? It was sort of a minor version of Adler's, a lot of it. He did mostly Tudor. Adler did one or two very carefully done Tudor things. Walcott took sort of a free swing at it. I spent the rest of the winter with him, that was it. Then came summer and somewhere along the way Dorothy and I just took off and went to Europe. We were there for eight or nine months, I guess.

Blum: What were some of the projects in Russell Walcott's office that you worked on?

Schweikher: This was when Lee Atwood and I spent a great amount of our time admiring the work of Mies van de Rohe. We did a lot of that, just looking. We did a lot of movie going when we got tired. Walcott, as long as you got your work done, didn't care what kind of hours you worked. It used to drive poor Hinkley up the wall because he was a hard plodding kind of a guy. Atwood was one of these geniuses: he could draw everything that it took any other man a T-square, triangle, table, and a few things of that sort to do. Atwood could move vertically and horizontally on the same instrument without any trouble at all, just with his quickness. I had learned a lot about drafting and proportion and so on. This was a whole period of learning and being proud of the ability to draw. I felt that in Adler's office I learned proportion and I learned how to see. I could look at a drawing as far away as that wall and tell you whether it was off a quarter of an inch on a quarter inch scale. No doubt about it, I could see it.

22 Blum: How did you learn that skill?

Schweikher: Because Adler had it. Adler had that ability; he couldn't draw himself at all, but he could tell you whether your drawing was off a quarter of an inch. That was his whole idea, the strict proportion between solid wall and windows and so on. You talk about studying brick walls and open spaces. We were way ahead of William Wurster.

Blum: Let's step back for a minute. It seems that your employment with David Adler was a key time in your development. You were there from 1925 to 1927. When you left the Granger and Bollenbacher office you went to Adler's office on the recommendation of Frank Venning?

Schweikher: Yes, on the recommendation of Frank Venning I went to see John Leavell. I guess you've seen his name somewhere. John, I think, did do a commission or two on his own. He was a University of Illinois graduate. John sort of took a liking to me, as the old expression used to go, and he and his wife use to run Dorothy and me around. By the way, he was a championship golfer in Chicago.

Blum: Was he the head designer?

Schweikher: He was the head draftsman. He was the head draftsman in the sense that Norman Rice was the dean of Carnegie Mellon. John Leavell believed in no discipline. He just liked to have parties for his people and he'd tell you how not to do something rather than how to do it. The idea of being under John Leavell was to have a pleasant time. Although he was good draftsman himself, I don't think he taught me anything. David Adler did, I couldn't help it. He couldn't draw a thing. He fought the drawing instruments on my table. It used to make me laugh and cry at the same time because he was bound to tear your drawing if you weren't careful. You tried to say, “Oh, Mr. Adler, I'll draw that.” He'd take his hand away then and say, “Yes,

23 you draw it, but you've got to draw... can't you see it, can't you see it?” Well, we learned to see it, those of us who really cared, and I did care. I wanted to beat the tar out of him. I wanted to be able to see things that he couldn't see. I really worked at it. I think he finally admitted that I could see things. He wasn't going to admit that I could see them quicker or better than he. I admired him so much. It was a taste deal all the time. It was always, “Of this or that choice, what do you pick?” In my own opinion I never saw him make an error in color, in texture, whatever. Wonderful. Of course he had a sister, Frances Adler Elkins, who was practically equally gifted in that field, and who helped him with his interiors. I was there for two solid years followed by Yale for theory under the great and imaginative Otto Faelton, and then I skipped. I was offered a job at James Gamble Rogers's office, which all scholarship winners got anyway.

Blum: Let's go back to David Adler's office. What do you think you learned from the two years you spent with him?

Schweikher: I think I learned scale. There would be those who would scoff if I said I learned to see. Yes, I learned to see. I really learned to see and to know what I was looking at. This could be historically, it could be in proportion, certainly in scale, the relationship of one thing to another or especially to human use. John Turner was one of those at the Adler office and he was working on the servants' stairway for the Marshall Field house in New York. He was having trouble getting it into the plan and so he cut it down a little bit. The servants stair just wasn't going in the plan very well, so John just cut off about two inches. Adler then came and his prize remark was “You can't do that. You know, servants are people too.” It was the classic remark. We thought that was such a nice condescending estimation. That stood for almost two years, I guess. The Fields had some of the most beautiful things that they brought over from London intact and put in the rooms.

Blum: This was the Marshall Field house on East 70th Street in New York City.

24 Schweikher: Yes, I got one look at it and the next time I went back to look at it, it was gone.

Blum: Who else worked in David Adler's office?

Schweikher: Well, there was John Turner, John Leavell, Freddie Ahlson, Al Eiseman, and George Eich. George was the secretary that I understood absconded with some money. Who told me that not long ago? Oh yes, a person who lives in Tucson called me up one day and said, “I saw your house published. You and I seem to have had the same career. I worked once with David Adler.” I said, “When was that? That must have been before the 1920s, or was it or after?” He said it was after, probably about 1929 or 1930. I was gone from there. I can't remember his name, but he wasn't there when I was, anyway. I can still see the faces clearly as can be, especially John Leavell's.

Blum: You said it was a larger office then?

Schweikher: We had just two rooms in the Orchestra Hall building. Adler just bided his time until he could get the two offices next to the staircase and then he rented those.

Blum: What were some of the projects that you worked on?

Schweikher: The McCormick Blair house.

Blum: In Lake Bluff?

Schweikher: Yes, I did most of the details on that. Freddie Ahlson did the plans. I did almost all of the detailing on that. In fact, I think I did all of the detailing. The comment I guess I made in that book was that Adler said, “Well, part of the charm of the house is the inaccuracy of the details.” That was a way of slamming one at me.

25 Blum: Did he say that to you?

Schweikher: No, he said it to somebody that he knew was going to tell me. I think it was Robert Allerton. I didn't make the inaccuracies. Reeves, the superintendent, said, “It was the mill that was making all the mistakes.” I said, “Yes, I know that.” I had checked my figures. But it had come shortly after my great debacle with the Cable house. I guess it was the Cable Music Company. The Cables had bought a house and they had some acreage with it. It was a rather grand old house out near Winnetka and I never went there. I was given the task, because it was such a small job—this was early in my history—of designing a garden wall. The wall was going to be about ten feet high and big, and was about two and half feet thick. It wound up with a whole set of urns on the top and wrought iron gates and things of that sort which I also designed. It had two corners to it. It was to be centered on these two windows in the house, to look down a path near a perennial bed. This was a path near a perennial bed. It was nearly in the center but not quite on the center because there was a giant apple tree that was not worth much but it was an archaic twisted thing. The contractor started the job wrong and exposed the roots when the Cables called up and said, “We don't want that tree to die.” So we moved the pool over and put piling in and filled in against the roots of the apple tree and about this time I got the job. It was turned over to me; they got that far with their excavation. I was to do the walls under Adler's direction. I did the walls and I came to the corners and I did a dovecote and there was a great gazebo looking back over the garden and these two giant French doors on each side of the house were to be center on the path next to the perennials. I didn't hear anything more about the job. I kept asking Reeves, “How's the Cable house doing?” “It's coming along fine.” Until one day he came in and said, “Paul, we're in trouble.” I said, “What do you mean we're in trouble?” He said, “The tractor started down the right hand path, it got to the point where he was to turn the ninety-degree corner, it turned the corner, he went down and put the gazebo in and he started back, took his sights and said,

26 “We're three feet off center coming back. We can't move that way because of the pool. If we move that way you'll move the pool back and it'll uncover the tree. What do we do?” “My god,” I said, “don't tell Adler. Where's the error?” He said, “Well, I think you made the error.” I said, “Are you sure? I checked that back and forth.” I never did find out, nobody every told me. I asked John Gregg over and over again so maybe it was my error.

Blum: How was that ever resolved? Did it just always remain three feet off?

[Tape 2: Side 1]

Schweikher: The worst part about it was that Adler came into the office one day and I remember Reeves telling him, “Mr. Adler, we need your judgment.” He described this thing.” “All right,” said Adler, “This whole thing is a gift of mine to Cable. It's not going to cost him any money.” It was going to cost Adler money. In those days it didn't cost very much and you could build that whole thing for $100,000. That wasn't considered very much for most people, but Cable wasn't a very rich man. At any rate Adler said, “Move the wall. It isn't up very far anyway.” Well, you went down in that area, you went down three feet to three and one half feet to frost line and so that meant go clear down along side it. We went down, cut down, along side it and then put jacks down on the other side of the wall and pushed the wall over. Of course, some of the concrete cracked and some didn't but it held up pretty well, they were reinforced footings. We got it all in and then started with the other wail. It narrowed the perennial bed, it was a huge thing and it narrowed it. Leave the other one alone but let the wall take a piece off. That was all fine, they put the perennial bed back in and everything was just find and dandy. All this movement in order to keep it symmetrical and preserve the apple tree. They got it alI ready, got the pool in, they came to fill the pool and the fellow said, who ever it was, it could have been Franz Lipp, I can't remember exactly who it was...

Blum: A landscape architect?

27 Schweikher: Yes, he looked at it and said, “What are you trying to save that tree for?” “Because it's so beautiful.” “But it's dead. It died.” “When did it die?” “It must have died sometime during the construction.” I was never forgiven, I think. Adler never forgave me, although we served a couple of times together in later years, on juries for the University of Illinois.

Blum: How do you remember David Adler, as a person?

Schweikher: I met very few people I think that I thought of as I did Adler, as in charge. If he said it, it must be so, to me. He said, “This is the way it is done.” I thought of him as a master. I still think of him that way today. I've written that a number of times and said it in talks. We copied everybody. They were all dead. We copied Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren and Grinling Gibbons.

Blum: Was this done in his office from books?

Schweikher: You bet, with the dividers. When we copied under David Adler we copied accurately.

Blum: What is a divider?

Schweikher: Inter-proportional dividers, they have a sliding scale here. This one reads differently than this one depending upon where this fulcrum is. If you want to increase a drawing by one and a half scale you set this interior fulcrum at one and a half integer and measure it with the other end. This end automatically comes out at the inch and one half scale. I wish we had all kinds of time because I have one here somewhere to show you, I just uncovered it.

Blum: Was that an unusual practice in those days?

28 Schweikher: Unheard of. People copied. I'm sure the great Charles McKim copied things left and right but he was considered to be quite imaginative. Rather than copy them cold he did a little innovating and that got him free of this and that difficulty. The critics, Vincent Scully and so on, rushed quickly to his defense by saying, “Look at the imagination he used.”

Blum: The process that you're describing, that of taking details out of books, was that unusual in offices in the 1920s? You worked for Lowe and Bollenbacher, David Adler, and Russell Walcott. Was that the usual process in each of those offices?

Schweikher: I think a flat yes would be accurate but might be modified somewhat, as it applied to each situation.

Blum: What do you mean?

Schweikher: I think it would be taken, but almost invariably modified because of its presence in the larger frame of the detail, or modified internally in order that it fit in with the general proportions of the larger scheme.

Blum: It seems that they were used as tools?

Schweikher: Where copying was successful it had undergone judgment, discernment, sense of scale, appropriateness, all those forms of selective judgment that would be available. I think there were forms among people who only copied, photographically, as it were, without any effort at fitting it to the subject. I should wind up by saying that the end result of a great amount of that kind of work would indicate an architect being influenced by rather than copying from these books. The whole sum and substance would be that a man might be influenced by the work of Mies van der Rohe or influenced by McKim, Mead and White, or influenced by Bernini, or Michelangelo, or Alberti and so on. A Renaissance architect's work was so intermingled with adaptation of and imitation of and so on, and sometimes

29 improvements upon. I find it very difficult to define copying other than as something photographic.

Blum: What was a typical day for you in the office of David Adler?

Schweikher: I'm tempted to say that the day didn't begin until the arrival of David Adler, but I think that isn't correct. Each of us had work to do, assignments to work upon. I think it would be correct to add that the feeling of the day didn't begin until Adler's presence was known in the office by everyone. Then there seemed to be a change in the atmosphere, a kind of industrious hum, and quiet prevailed, but it was the quiet of paying attention to the drawing board rather than just an empty silence. Our signal of this change was usually the opening of the door, which was not noisy but was audible nevertheless, and the hard heels and quick pace of David Adler coming down the corridor outside the drafting room partition which separated the conference room and the entrance from the drafting room. There would be rather muffled voices as Adler asked questions of George, the secretary, and gave instructions to call this or that client or contractor. I think we also felt at that point, especially those of us who were active in interpreting and drawing up design material on plans, sections or elevations, that there was the anticipation of Adler's entering the drafting room and selecting the person with whom he was going to work for the next few minutes or next hour or two.

Blum: How often were you the person he selected?

Schweikher: I was not often the person who was selected. My whole experience in the Adler office lasted approximately two years. It wasn't until toward the end of the second year that I was trusted with a whole project. Even then the projects were becoming sizable enough, such as the Marshall Field house in New York and some of the California and Hawaiian Island work, the projects were so big that they had to be divided up among us. Then, too, we became specialists somewhat in the office in our own right. This was

30 perhaps because of Adler's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with us individually. Freddie Ahlson, for example, was probably the plan man. Fred knew planning, he knew how Adler liked to plan and I think he applied himself directly to the subject better than any of the rest of us. As I developed in the office, I became, it's my guess, the detail man. I knew I was good at small-scale work. I was fascinated by Adler's sharp eye for detail and scale. He was a man who could come to the drafting board and see small-scale work, where we were working on plans sometimes as small as an eighth of an inch to the foot, and could discuss inches at that scale. It was a common thing if I were working, for example, at a larger scale, three inches to the foot on larger details, I would think nothing of being instructed to move a line a quarter of an inch at that scale because Adler saw a difference in proportion or expression. Adler would sit with us and he would come to the board. I say this in detail because so frequently my impression of other architects was that they worked frequently in their own studios and then their preliminary work was passed on with written instructions to the drafting room and taken over by a skilled draftsman and interpreted, and then taken back for criticism, and ultimately the final drawing emerged. This process was not unknown in the Adler office. It was followed to a degree. But I don't know of any project that ever came into the office that didn't get Adler's frequent personal attention, sitting at the draftsman's elbow.

Blum: Was he the sole designer of projects?

Schweikher: In general, Adler was the sole designer. He set the key always for scheme, plan, and then the development of the structure in three dimensions. I thought of Adler as no draftsman; when he took a pencil in hand it was apt to be a rather clumsy scribble in which his own impatience with his inability to draw was apparent. Instruments troubled him. Freehand he didn't control his hand well, in my opinion, and an instrument never really helped. I can recall a number of times that I had a triangle that was split. I can't remember whether it was a sixty or forty-five degree. I guess it was a forty-

31 five because I preferred it on the drawing board because I could switch it to so many angles more quickly than with a T-square, and that split invariably caught in the paper, or against the T-square or, as so frequently happened with the old large celluloid instruments, it would fall out of line and overlap itself. This happened in the middle of a discussion in which Adler was trying to show me where a line should go and the triangle misbehaved and Adler stopped everything and thumped it heavily with his fist trying to correct it and teach it a lesson. Without a smile or without a joke he finally, with a half grunt of dissatisfaction, stood up and just let it lie and left. I can remember that experience. His presence was that kind of presence, in other words. There was a personal presence that did not extend into any friendship or camaraderie.

Blum: Was there a feeling of goodwill within the office?

Schweikher: Yes, it was always pleasant. Our outdoor job superintendent, Reeves, was a big fellow and acted as a kind of newsman or reporter. He would be out on the job, come in late in the morning, or in the middle of the afternoon to report on how the work was progressing on a given job. That was always news to us all. He rarely left out a detail; some of them were pleasant to hear, some of them embarrassing if one of us had made a mistake. I made plenty of them, so that Reeves's reports were of considerable importance to me because I was usually involved in one error or another. Sometimes the ultimate decision was in my favor, but more often it was the error of a person without enough experience. The superintendent was a kind of teacher there. You could watch your own work grow through him, on the job. I think Reeves elected to do it that way, it was as part of his own report to Adler, no doubt. He would frequently say this in order to let the draftsmen be aware that Adler might be on top of him for some error. This happened to me more than once. In order to get the accurate story on one occasion where we had let a drawing lie fallow for quite a while, it was a matter of choice for the head draftsman, John Leavell, about what to do on the project, which had been on my desk for some time with comment. John

32 said, “If there have been no instructions, let a sleeping dog lie.” That was his expression. I wrapped the preliminary drawings and the plans of Dillingham house carefully in a self-made portfolio and filed them away. When the telegram came asking Adler where the designs were, Leavell and Adler came in to ask me what had been done. I said that the drawings were still in the file. Adler looked at me in shock and sat down on a drafting room stool, put his elbows on one of the tables in front of me and looked at me steadily for the next forty or fifty minutes without comment.

Blum: You got the message.

Schweikher: I'd like to say that we soon got to work on the project, but we didn't. As I remember it, it was nearly time for me to return to school.

Blum: Yale?

Schweikher: Yes. The drawing was turned over, probably to John Gregg to work with Adler because the maze was built and it was planted. It was built in concrete and then stripped for receiving vines of some special kind in Hawaii and I believe it's standing today.

Blum: This maze, is this a garden arrangement?

Schweikher: Yes. I didn't work on it so I can't describe it in detail. As we had originally talked about it, it was reinforced concrete or concrete block or the combination of both in a Greek key design, a meandering maze of some con- siderable height, eight to ten feet I believe, with thicknesses of two to three feet, maybe more, and rather extensive. It demanded considerable planning. I shouldn't go on about it because I didn't have anything to do with its design or with its completion. I think I was told by John Gregg at some later date that they had completed it. I believe there's a reference to it in the book by Pratt.

33 Blum: What was the relationship between David Adler and Robert Work?

Schweikher: It's not one that I'm completely familiar with. It was generally known in the office that Robert Work's presence there was not as a skilled practitioner as much as simply a name under the state law as a registered architect. This gave Adler the sanction to practice architecture in the state of Illinois. As soon as Adler was equipped with a license of his own the partnership was dissolved. I believe that Robert Work, shortly after that, formed a partnership with Russell Walcott. The only experience that was revealing was that I think I was asked by Robert Work along with Freddie Ahlson to do some extra work, evenings and Saturday afternoons, on a school or small church in Barrington. We were to keep this quiet, not make a big secret of it but not have them in evidence around the drafting room. They were to be done for a client of Robert Work's and Robert Work did the designing. It was a rather plain, little building with none of the flair that an Adler project would have. It was done quietly and quickly gotten out of the way, and was never talked about. I think this was probably true of anything architectural that originated with Work. He was not a person in the drafting room. He was never present in any of the discussions of Adler designs as far as I know, never consulted. The people who were the most important in design were: John Turner, who did most of the work on the Marshall Field house; and John Leavell, who did a great amount working with me on full size details for Field, McCormick, and such people. Later there was John Gregg, now John Gregg Allerton, who became an interviewer of clients in place of David Adler himself. That's about the relationship there.

Blum: Where was the David Adler office located?

Schweikher: The office that I worked in—I think it was enlarged a year or two after I left because he had more work than he could handle and I'm sure that he added more people to the force—was in the upper story of Orchestra Hall, just under the Cliff Dwellers Club, but above everything else. Table height in the

34 drawing room was about even with the room over the Orchestra Hall. There was a kind of curvature, the interior dome or dome aspect of the hall was expressed somewhat in the core structure of the roof, which had been covered with asphalt paper and gravel and many coats of Chicago soot. Our windows all opened on that roof. It was rather a long narrow drafting room, just wide enough for a row of large tables, five to seven feet long, and a good big aisle and then a very light partition sometimes alternating in obscure glass and plaster. Outside of that was a continuation of the public corridor to the door that then opened into a kind of L in the drafting room and the L on one side went into the library, which was a large and splendid library. The library itself then came back toward the entrance with a private office for Adler, the secretary's office, and then a conference room. That was what it was when I was there. The conference room, therefore, and Adler's office, and the secretary's office, all looked out on Michigan Avenue. This also was a convenient location for Adler who I guess was a member of the Cliff Dwellers Club.

Blum: Just one story up?

Schweikher: Adler was gone by the time Elting and I joined the Cliff Dwellers Club and so I didn't know of his presence there as a member, but I am sure that he, and, I suppose, Robert Work, may have been. I was about to say that he wouldn't be so stern or even cruel as to exclude Robert Work. I think I would take that back and say that perhaps he would. He might not want Robert Work to be a member on that same basis. Robert Work was really more a kind of employee rather than a partner.

Blum: Well, it's interesting you say that because on this photograph of the Marshall Field house in New York City, credits for the project are given to David Adler and Robert Work.

Schweikher: Yes. The title on the door was David Adler and Robert Work, Architects.

35 Blum: There must have been some formal arrangement.

Schweikher: If Robert Work had close relationships in a business sense with David Adler, it was not ever very clear in the office. You would never expect to meet Adler on a bus or a streetcar. But I did in fact a number of times, while running errands or something of that sort late in the day or early in the morning, find myself standing or sitting next to Robert Work on a bus or over on Clark Street in a streetcar.

Blum: How did David Adler get around?

Schweikher: I don't know how he traveled. He probably did what you say you have done, walk. When he was in the city he lived on State Street. He had converted an old house there and done a beautiful job with it. He was athletically built, a light frame. You felt that in looking at him, for light exercise, he was just the right build. You could see him on Michigan Boulevard walking quite smartly and impeccably, I guess is the word for it, dressed. He dressed in the latest fashion and with great restraint and never reflecting any country, even when he would go out to Lake Forest, because they had a home in Lake Forest, or near there. Adler wouldn't be the one to come in wearing riding boots or any reflection of the country gentleman. He was still the city gentleman. Very conservatively dressed, never carried a stick or cane. The nice part about Chicago as I compare it with where I sit now is that barbers were plentiful and always nearby, wherever you were, and the very best. It must be that Adler was given careful attention because his mustache was always trimmed. The spirit of the office in general was pleasant, very playful, maybe too playful when Adler was gone from the office. His habits were rather regular so that the secretary, George Eich, would warn the drafting room that Adler was coming and of course the click of Adler’s heels was an additional warning of his arrival. Whatever was going on, which could amount to playing ball with rolled drafting paper to pushing quarrels, friendly or unfriendly, it wasn't always just the quiet concentration of pencils on the drafting board, stopped. It was a

36 noisy office frequently and not always friendly, but the general tone was friendly. Certainly work was done, and lots of the interest was keen. I think the other thing one might say about it was that we knew we were good and we knew that the city knew it.

Blum: It sounds like an ideal place for a young person to gain experience.

Schweikher: Yes. If you worked for David Adler and somebody asked you that at a meeting or something, you could say, “Well, I worked for David Adler,” and the response was “Oh!”

Blum: How many young inexperienced people were in Adler's office?

Schweikher: I think I would modify that by saying how many inexperienced people. I was undoubtedly, at the time that I was there, probably the least experienced. John Turner and John Leavell were the two experienced men; you would call either one of them a senior draftsman. That was the term of those days.

Blum: How many people like you without degrees in architecture were employed in the office?

Schweikher: About the same number. Fred Ahlson did not have a degree, I did not have a degree, Al Eiseman did not have a degree, and then there were two others unnamed. One had a degree from Illinois, a sandy-haired fellow and I can't remember his name—he was an obnoxious kind of person, it's just as well. There was another person who had a table behind me and who was feisty. I never could say anything that pleased him, and he never could please me with anything he said so we had a kind of conspiracy of silence between us. He didn't finish school. The other person was a graduate of University of Illinois. And then came John Gregg who had two bachelor's degrees, one from Wisconsin and one from Illinois, and he was also the—I don't know what you would call the relationship of his companion and close friend

37 Robert Allerton at that time, but Allerton was also a good close friend of David Adler’s and very social, in the social swim. Allerton's portrait used to be on the society page as one of the eligible bachelors of Chicago. John brought a kind of new tone to the office in the sense of its social status. The rest of us didn't have that, and John brought it in, also with a great sense of humor. He would tell us all of the stories of the social life around town because he was frequently a part of it. And certainly with Monticello, I think that was what Allerton's place was called.

Blum: Was this the name of his home near the University of Illinois in Champaign?

Schweikher: Yes, of his estate. He had about 10,000 acres down along the Sangamon River, right on the edge of Monticello. I don't remember what the county is like there. Allerton gave a great bit of it to the University, keeping, I think, only the house and the garden walk down to the river and so on. I've never been there, but some friends of ours have. John still goes, I think if he's still living now, but we don't know that. I haven't heard from him now in two years. We had to call him up, it must have been a year or year and a half ago, to find out how he was and so on. Right in the middle of the discussion they were hit by that tremendous hurricane that did considerable damage to the Allerton garden, which is many, many acres. It was about to be published in a German horticultural magazine, according to John. But he said, “Well it's rainy and blowing outside.” In his typically calm, quiet way he didn't make much of it and we haven't heard from him since. So we don't know. That' s about the story as far as I know it. I can tell this at a later point. There were other rather amusing stories of our construction of a garden at the Cable house.

Blum: From David Adler's office in 1927 you left and went to Yale. Why Yale?

Schweikher: Two things, I think. One was the Beaux Arts Bulletin. The other was Freddie Ahlson. Fred had applied for and received a scholarship. What he gave as

38 his qualifications I don't know, but knowing something of Everett Meeks, the dean of the School of Architecture at that time, I think it was simply Meeks's pleasure to admit people who had beginnings in offices rather than those who were stepping up academically. Also Ahlson would have been able to provide examples of excellent working drawing work that maybe, and I was never told this by Ahlson or Adler; it may have been that Adler might have written a letter of recommendation.

Blum: Did he write one for you?

Schweikher: No, because I had left in that rather unpropitious time. It was about that time that the Cable debacle occurred and I had left under a frown from David Adler. I think he would just as soon that I didn't come back so I didn't want to annoy him. I would like to have come back during the summer but I didn't. I went to Walcott's office instead.

Blum: Did Fred Ahlson enter Yale at the same time you did?

Schweikher: No, he was a year ahead of me. Ahlson was there a year. While there he placed in the Paris Prize competition, which was a competition that is best described by reference to the American Beaux-Arts system used by most colleges and ateliers in that everybody subscribed to it. Whatever you might have said, I was probably one of those that helped break it up because I thought I was part of a new spirit of the times. I'm sorry that we broke it up and I think many architects feel the same way. It was a system that not only kept all of the students of architecture together, in a way, across the nation because by reference to one another you knew what was going on. It also related us somewhat to the French tradition. Of course, that was what we were trying to break up.

Blum: Why do you think you were instrumental in breaking the system?

Schweikher: Because after I graduated I gave it no credit and did work that was

39 certainly not in the French tradition.

Blum: That was 1929?

Schweikher: The Beaux-Arts was a strong influence, although our student work was beginning to show change. I'll show you a couple of the Bulletins. We began to rebel, even in our work. It was no longer Renaissance, it was no longer classically related.

Blum: What was it then?

Schweikher: It was independent and borrowing from whatever, although the borrowing was usually from people who had already graduated from the French schools. Tony Garnier and such people were our influences of that time, the real influences.

Blum: Were the people and the ideas of the Bauhaus influential in the late 1920s?

Schweikher: The Bauhaus was a strong influence, but not in the way that it was for Bertrand Goldberg. I was not a student at the Bauhaus.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Blum: What influenced you?

Schweikher: I was at Yale for two years and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Our influences were in the form of professors, appointed professors, for the specific task. Sheppard Stevens was the historian and we learned the history of architecture, with frequent reference to Sir Banister Fletcher. I think that was Stevens' bible, or possibly Belcher MacCartney. I was acquainted with Belcher MacCartney because it was a big volume that David Adler had and it certainly had the classical references of Letarouilly—the names won't come to me—and French

40 classical publications on the early Renaissance architects from Borromini and Michelangelo on to Alberti, etc.

Blum: How was Sheppard Stevens a great influence on you?

Schweikher: He gave a history course and a lecture course that brought all of the Renaissance—and I think he was very strong in the Renaissance—and French Gothic together. He also used perhaps more English country churches than would have been architecturally important mostly because Sheppy Stevens I'm sure must have loved the English countryside. At Yale he smoked rather constantly—probably as a costume more than as a habit—a large bent pipe like a meerschaum but not a meerschaum. He wore his hair very long and had a pointed beard that he kept very trim. He always wore a fine Harris tweed coat with matching pants—the best description of them would be pantaloons; they were the golf costume of the day, knickers that bagged down well over the knee onto the calf leaving a little ankle exposed with wool socks, usually with a pattern or color, and on to brogues with flapping tongues. This was Sheppy Stevens. The rest of his costume was a collie dog. He walked the Yale campus between classes in this manner and of course the students accepted the whole affectation with some humor. His classes were essentially not discourse as much as slides and drawings and constant analysis, graphic analysis of the slides. I think that Vincent Scully followed some of that pattern because he must have had Sheppy as a teacher, at least for part of his school years later. But Vincent, of, course found his own way and probably writes a great bit better than Sheppy Stevens, who is no slouch. Sheppy kept in touch with us by demanding once a week a drawing, about a five by eight drawing, that could be in any medium: ink, pencil or lithograph. But we were to hand in an architectural detail. This took maybe an hour or two to draw, not much more than that. Mine fell into strong favor with Stevens. What reminded me of that was when I became chairman at Yale he was ex-faculty by then and he said that he had admired my drawings because they avoided looking facile but they undoubtedly were done quickly and easily and they were

41 somewhat in the manner of the drawings that we lost. I did them in lithographs, on smooth cardboard and I would do them of details copied from the various photographs. There's nothing like remembering an architectural subject more than the picture, this is the true business of a drawing: telling more than words. These were all collected by Sheppy. He graded on the basis of 10 being perfect and I never got anything less than a 10+. It got so that I could use Sheppy's course and the watercolor course, which was given by a man by the name of Parks, not a full professor—the two were great padding for me because I could let them go as long as I pleased and always get a top score on them. Not all the students could do that. I think a great many had a rather easy school in that respect. A great many people got rather high scores. I was one of those who got high scores on my graphic performance; I was good at it. I had had about four to five years of office experience, all self-instructed really.

Blum: Did you have drafting classes at Yale?

Schweikher: Yes, of course, the Beaux-Arts system required that. I began in the Beaux- Arts system. I had already passed through the analytique. It was divided into three major sections. These were printed programs sent to all members of the Beaux-Arts system, across the United States, the analytique was the beginners’ section. This began with Greek and Roman details, capitals, entablatures, and sculptures.

Blum: Where did you get that training?

Schweikher: I got that training in the ateliers in Chicago, the Parson Atelier and the Chicago School Atelier, which was later out on Prairie Avenue. The original Parsons was on Clark Street. The acquisition of Glessner house and the building across the street from it, Kimball house—that's what we occupied. That was occupied by the Architectural Sketch Club. That was where I spent most of my time later. I liked the Clark Street place better because it was nearer and I could get there easier. It was harder to get out to Prairie

42 Avenue, although I guess I continued to walk that distance. There was no other kind of transportation other than the bus.

Blum: So then you entered the second segment at Yale?

Schweikher: I entered Yale as, I guess the equivalent of a junior. Everett Meeks, to be distinguished from and kept separate from Carroll Meeks, was a historian and a kind of contemporary for a while of Vincent Scully’s, although a little older than Scully. Carroll had nothing to do with the direction or deanship of Yale. Everett Meeks preceded me on the faculty. He was the dean of the school, which when I was there was a school, and then when I became chairman at Yale it became a department, and then under my appointee, Spiegel, it became a school again. That was Yale. My experience as a student was when it was a school but less a school in the present academic sense. The school name, I think when I was at Yale, was rather carelessly used. Now it's separate and distinct from a college, or a department. A school is not a department.

Blum: Why did you select Yale?

Schweikher: I selected Yale partly because of its performance in the Beaux-Arts. The way that you found out what was going on in the Beaux-Arts was a monthly bulletin was issued by the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design that was financed by the various members. The ateliers perhaps didn't contribute as much as the universities did. The universities paid, I guess, most of its way. It had its central offices in New York. The juries were periodic, I think there was a monthly jury. They selected the premiated—I guess those were terms used in those days—prize drawings, the drawings that got awards. There was a system of awards and you got First Mention award, that was the top award, the Analytique class, and then the Class B class. The seniors in college, top scholars in the ateliers, earned their way by collecting values. You got values for how many projects you did and for what grade you got. You got more values if your drawing was premiated. You got into Class A,

43 and in Class A you could get so many values which would make you automatically eligible to be put into the second prelim for the Paris Prize. This was your ultimate goal, or you could win your way into the Paris Prize by taking the first prelim for the Paris Prize and being one of five selected across the United States for admission to the second prelim of the Paris Prize. If you passed the second prelim—out of the second prelim there were only five people selected for the final—then you took the final en loge, which meant you went to New York and you went into a place at the Beaux Art where you had your own little studio. Your expenses were taken care of. I never got to that point so I don't know, but their room and board was paid for and they had to live and work for the period necessary to complete the final presentation for the competition. Freddie Ahlson got to that part and then he didn't win. Don Nelson, who was in the Lowe and Bollenbacher office, did get to the final, and he won the Paris Prize and that's the last I ever heard of Donald Nelson. He had gone to MIT as a scholar. That was another reason why I mentioned Donald Nelson who was a fellow draftsman in Lowe and Bollenbacher's office at the time that I was there. Don was simply a quick developer. He was later one of the architects on the Chicago Century of Progress buildings. After that I heard that he was down doing some rather important project work in Texas somewhere, then he faded from my view and I don't know why.

Blum: How did you do with the Paris Prize?

Schweikher: I went to Yale as a Class B student and therefore I was not eligible in any way. Automatically, that is, by gradation, I was not eligible for the Paris Prize. But I was eligible to try to be made eligible by taking the first examination, which was a sketch prize, a memorial of some kind, a war memorial. I've got it in there. I made it and I was one of those chosen. I was eligible to take the second prelim. I took it and I didn't make anything in it. That was the one that Ahlson didn't pass. It was a master plan, I hadn't gotten to master planning, a plan for a large university. Ahlson did a fine job, he got into it, but he didn't make the final.

44 Blum: In addition to Ahlson, who were your classmates?

Schweikher: You asked how come I went to Yale. When Ahlson had left to study at Yale, the Beaux-Arts Bulletin began to show Ahlson three or four times. There were two kinds of medals. You got a medal in the Class A when you put in a project if you were premiated. Ahlson, a number of times, got a second medal, which was a bronze medal. I have one somewhere, I don't know where, they get lost in the shuffle. I got a second medal for an archaeology project, but Ahlson, on projects, got quite a number of second medals and then he got one or two first medals. Ahlson piled up enough of those values where he was eligible for the grand Paris Prize competition and he came back to Yale to do that when I was a senior student. But he didn't make it. I thought his solution was wonderful, I thought it was a beautiful solution. I never saw him again. I've seen his name, I think about a year ago, in the list of various contributors to the architectural budget at Yale, so he must be doing well because he sent a rather sizable contribution.

Blum: Was his achievement an influence on your choice?

Schweikher: Seeing that, yes. We didn't carry on any correspondence. We were not very close friends. He was probably, if anything, a year younger than I. He was ahead of me in his architectural development and I thought of him as a senior to me, as I did Donald Nelson. Ahlson had persuaded the dean to accept him as a special student in the same manner that Nelson had been accepted at MIT. They were both sort of permissive scholars whose work had impressed the deans. Jacques Carlu was the head of MIT at that time, a direct French import. I don't think he ever did any architecture, he must not have lived very long. He did the Rome Prize, Jacques Carlu himself did the Rome Prize, which was the top prize at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He won that and that's the last I ever heard of him. I was tempted to go to MIT. I went to MIT and looked at it, Dorothy and I had looked at it. I didn't like the Charles River and I didn't like the crowding of Boston

45 because it all looked too big and was too full of traffic. It was too institutional, the rather somber buildings at MIT, they were too massive. At Yale a little of the old campus still remained, the elm trees and the old fence and, of course, I was very much impressed by the Collegiate Gothic buildings that James Gamble Rogers had done. I didn't know a damn thing about it but it was great to walk through those quadrangles, they were intimate and small, and have the kids calling across to one another. They didn't have those, what do you call those things to throw? Frisbees. They were all out throwing footballs or playing softball. I thought that looked fine to me. Princeton was not in it at that time so it didn't occur to me to go to Princeton. I guess if I was a student these days, and had to do it all over again, I’d wonder why Princeton isn't more popular. I taught there sporadically for about a year as a guest. I thought it was better than Yale in many respects. It was still smaller, cozier.

[Tape 3: Side 2]

Blum: What was considered the best architectural school at the time you selected Yale?

Schweikher: I don't know, I guess we were too preoccupied with ourselves to ever ask the question. I think we all assumed that it was Yale and I guess it was as far as our performance in the Beaux-Arts system was concerned. We got the most publications, we got the highest awards and we were in the news the most. The top schools in those days: Princeton wasn't even heard of, once in a while Cornell, MIT was no doubt second and second in our minds, but a strong third, and perhaps sometimes superior to MIT, was Catholic University in Washington—they were very strong and I felt that Tom Lowcraft was sort of a competitor of mine—the University of Illinois was then about fourth or fifth somewhere and the biggest man there was Abramovitz. The world was not very big in those times because later Abramovitz and I occupied the same dormitory at some kind of a symposium that they had at Illinois in which we both appeared as

46 consultants. I don't know why they put the two of us together in a dormitory. I remember sleeping overnight. I was very uncomfortable with this guy. Abramovitz was full of his own importance. At that time he was in Wally Harrison's office, I don't know whether it had been called Harrison and Abramovitz at that time. He was full of Le Corbusier and talking about them because they were busy on the United Nations building. It was before the big blow up with Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer, the South American, partly over communism and so on. That was my only contact with Abramovitz. In later years somebody in Pittsburgh asked me to come to New York and I found myself in the company of Wally Harrison. Wally and a man who was mentioned in Architectural Forum a lot—his name completely escapes me—he was doing mostly smart store interiors down on Fifth Avenue. He and Wally Harrison and I were asked to consult because there was going to be some big project that never happened. Wally Harrison built a house somewhere, whether it was his own house I don't know, or something for the Rockefellers. I guess it was just working for the Rockefellers because Nelson Rockefeller had a house right next door to G. David Thompson, and he was there before we built the Thompson house. It was at that time, I guess, that I got the message back from Wally Harrison, that came back to me through G. David Thompson, and said, “I have a message for you from Wally Harrison.” I think this was before we had been called together to New York. Wally said, “Tell Schweikher I always knew he was good, but not that good.” That must have been after our having met because otherwise he would have mentioned it in the meeting. I always felt friendly toward him but never saw anything that he did other than Rockefeller Center. That's the end of that diversion. That's sort of the Yale history. The reason for going to Yale was the record that it was making in the Beaux-Arts which was still very strong in the years that I was there. It began to wane I think about the time that I was traveling in Europe. I was certainly one of those who came back crammed full of Van der Vlugt—that was International Style, it was not Mies van der Rohe. We had gone to look at the Van Nelle tobacco factory in Rotterdam, and the house that he did for himself. We went from there to Germany to see this great development

47 that Mies and Le Corbusier, it was really under Mies's direction I think, the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart.

Blum: Was your travel in Europe funded by the fellowship that you won at Yale?

Schweikher: Yes, I was awarded the Matcham Traveling Fellowship at Yale.

Blum: You've mentioned that Otto Faelton was also a great influence on you. Was he one of your professors at Yale?

Schweikher: I'm glad you mention Otto Faelton. I was asked by the English publisher to name those whom I thought most influential and I think I started with Otto Faelton. The story of Otto with direct reference to me is both agreeable and disagreeable. My first year, and I have a project still in the Beaux-Art Bulletin in the library, one of the problems was a building for a horse-riding academy. Part of the Beaux-Art procedure was to make a sketch in ink. It came out in two pieces: the first piece was a transparent sheet printed with the nature of the project, it had the title of “The Riding Academy.” Then it explained how many horses, what the general nature of a riding academy was, no very strong social connections or political ones at all. I think deliberately they tried to keep such references out, but how you should keep horses and so on and the idea that there would be horse shows and so on, riding, that kind of thing. So I made an ink sketch. This was my first year at Yale, which was equivalent to a junior year. When I showed it to Faelton he shook his head, sat there for a while. He and I hadn't met before and he said, “Schweikher, you'd better go HC.” That was hors concourse, out of the running. That was permissible and you could get a grade on it but it meant that you only got a standard mention, you only got part of a value, you didn't get a full value. It meant you weren't going to work for six weeks on something if you weren't' going to get any value. We had an assistant by the name of Andy Euston, assistant to the critic during the time when the critic was absent, and the critic only came once a week at the end of the week. During the weekdays Andy would go around in our class and help,

48 usually because he was following the esquire, the sketch, the esquires which had been made, Andy would simply help you to fulfill the requirements of your esquisses and the program. And he had stood by as he was supposed to when the critic was there, to help you interpret the criticisms. Andy looked at it after Faelton had left and he sat down. I had made a long building, I think I have a sketch there too with a big loop. Andy said, “Why don't you develop that, you started it. Take that big center, it sort of makes you think that maybe it’s there for crowds. On the other side I see that you’ve got it for barn doors for horses. I don't see anything wrong with that. Why don't you develop that, develop the interior with seating and so on.” I thought it was great instruction. “Then I can submit it.” So I did. Otto came up the end of that week, saw my studies and said, “You're going to keep to the great half-smile are you? Just a great big half-smile, non-architecture.” I said, “Yes sir! I think I will! “All right, all right.” Then he turned around and left, never came near me. In fact, he didn't come near me the rest of that year. Later on he told Lamb and Gillette, he said, “Well Schweikher didn't need any criticism.” He just was angry that I hadn't followed his advice. I followed his advice almost all the time after that but I didn't get the medals I wanted. This project, I handed it in, it went to New York along with everything else and came back. It’s in there. It got First Mention place and I don't know what all. The whole school thought it was wonderful. I guess Bill Gillette got one too and Yale again carried the show but I think mine was at the top. We can see if we remember to look for it if there's time to do it.

Blum: So you won that award contrary to his advice?

Schweikher: Faelton was furious. He said, “I was on the jury, but I didn’t give any award.” That was all. He said, “You don't follow my advice,” and he just left. He and I didn't speak for the rest of that year and all the next year and then I elected to follow a great project, talk about copying I started right off being a good imitator. I took a project of Tony Garnier’s in which he developed a harbor for Cherbourg I think, on the Rome Prize. It was a huge

49 project. I took that project as a guide—more than a guide; I stole a lot of it. Of course by this time it must have been five to ten years old, it had been published in an academic way but it didn't go out publicly. I dug it out of the Yale archives, which was these huge tomes, all full size, they, were great big things you had to open them up. I spent a lot of time copying it in detail. I went to the city office in Chicago and asked for a plan of the city of Chicago and these guys were so stupefied, “Sure. What's this kid doing with a plan of Chicago?” They gave me some of the most beautiful photostats of the entire Harbor Plan and I put these down literally and then interpreted a whole harbor. My thesis was “Chicago as an International City upon Development of the St. Lawrence Waterways.” I won the Matcham prize for travel in Europe.

Blum: Did Faelton assist you?

Schweikher: It was almost the last day and Faelton came and said, “How are you getting along?” He didn't say any more, he just took off his coat, picked up a brush and got to work. He spent all that night working on my project, which is the most flattering thing. I could have wept at the time, I was so delighted. It set me up so much I knew damn well I was going to win the prize. When morning came I was ready to go over and be awarded the prize, and I was. Faelton wasn't present. He didn't come up for the awards. Ted Lamb came in after the awards were over and said, “I have a message for you from Faelton. He wants you to come down and see Rogers, for employment.'' “Are you going?” “Bill and I are talking about going. So, the three of us could go there and work.” I said, “No, I'm going to Europe.” Dorothy had meanwhile said nothing to me. Money meant an awful lot to us because we didn't have any of it. Dorothy had worked like hell and when I announced to her that I had $1,000 travelling fellowship—I guess you couldn't do much more with $10,000 today—Dorothy said, “I've got an equal amount.” She'd saved $1,000 from her laboratory work. We were rich, so off we went to Europe! We were going to be there for a year but Dorothy's doctors couldn't wait for her. They kept cabling her to, “Get

50 back, get back, we need you.” We wanted to see Hagia Sofia. I said, “That's our end wish and we've got to go there Dorothy. We've just got to go there.” We cut it short and we went back. At that time I then went back to Russ Walcott and brought in the story. Russ kept me standing there talking about the Weiner Werkstatte, Weissenhofsiedlung and the Van Nelle tobacco factory. He said, “That’s the architecture of the future Paul, isn’t it?” I said, “Well, I think so.” I remember Russ Walcott never got that out of his head because he always talked to me with the greatest respect after that. He went on doing these nice Tudor little houses, they were very nice, but his heart was no longer in it. Philip Maher called me. I guess he met Allerton socially or something because Allerton passed it on to me, “Philip Maher wants to get in touch with you.” He was looking for a designer. I went in and talked to this man, because I knew I couldn't become chief designer over Lee Atwood and I didn't want to. Lee Atwood was with Russ Walcott. That brings us up to Philip Maher.

Blum: Wasn't it at Yale that you met your future partner Ted Lamb?

Schweikher: Yes. Ted and I met, I think, in our first year. He'd come with a strong scholastic background, graduate of Dartmouth College, two years or more perhaps, I don't know why I limited it to two years but I got the impression it was only two years at Cambridge. He was there long enough to be on the crew and row against Oxford, all of which impressed me at the time very much. He was a very handsome guy. Ted glommed on to me. I didn't go out of my way to get Ted. But Ted and Bill Gillette became my friends. Bill was Gillette of Walker and Gillette, a son of the architect in New York. Bill knew his way around, he was a graduate of Yale College. He and Lamb had already begun to live off campus. They didn't have any quarters for me and Lamb said, “Wish we could get you in with us, but there isn't room.” I said, “I've got a young fellow from the painting school who comes from Clearfield, Pennsylvania, Dick Lippold. He's studying painting. He wants me to room with him. We think we've found a place down on High Street which we can rent.” It was that or Connecticut Hall and I think we finally

51 chose Connecticut Hall. That was before it was remodeled. The year went by and Ted did very well in his section. He was a year behind me scholastically. He was doing very well in smaller projects. He and I had a couple of classes together, calculus and I don't know what else, but we were not together in design. Gillette, with his father’s connection as a practicing architect in New York and a prominent one, got a little extra attention from Faelton. He and Lamb were strong favorites of Otto Faelton and mine. By picking that quarrel as it were by going my own way on the riding academy, I was not a friend of Faelton but I kept getting messages from Ted and from Bill saying, “Well, Faelton says you're doing all right.” I had to satisfy myself with it. I was a little bit pissed off. It wasn't as though my parents were sending me to school, this was my own carefully nurtured and saved money, and my wife’s. So I was really nettled by it until that final demonstration. Meanwhile, Lamb, Gillette and I and another fellow by the name of Peter Schladermundt from New York… Peter I think ultimately became a kind of interior decorator. I don't know what happened to Peter. He and I only met once again, it was on a jury, I think it was—Peter was in the stove jury that Howie Myers, editor of Architectural Forum, made up for the American Stove competition.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Schweikher: My friendship with Ted began in our classes that we had together and then as time went on at school we weren't part of the athletic activities of the University except as spectators. We went to most of the swimming, track, football and baseball matches whenever we could, whenever we had the time, we seemed to have plenty of it, in spite of being pretty hard workers in architectural school. We saw a lot of one another. Of course there were all kinds of student social things, private and general public, that's going on in those universities perhaps more than other universities at a great rate. The social life of Yale is pretty active among the students, professors and student professors, they overlap. I don't know that it's a greater school than any other but it’s because of this strong intermixing of scholastic and social

52 I think that helps make it so strong.

Blum: Did you and Ted Lamb, plan your future partnership at that time?

Schweikher: No. I don't think I really knew what was on Ted's mind. We didn't talk about that. What happened was that Ted and Bill went off to Fontainebleau, they had a summer school there under a famous director and they wanted to study under this fellow. Madame Boulanger was there in music, Ted's sister Jeanette thought she wanted to study under her. Ted's father had made a lot of money with the Curtis Publishing Company. All the kids had a lot of money at that time compared to most of us. He gave them all $250,000 to spend on themselves and each of them did. This was Ted, his brother Dick, his brother Dave and his sister Jeanette. He and Bill, who was also pretty well healed too, went to Fontainbleau and they took the summer architectural course there which was essentially social. There were lots of visits to Paris and the surrounding countryside and they said, “Please come. You and Dorothy come when you're in France.” So we went. We spent maybe a week or something like that, at any rate we were there in time for the great ball. We all went to the ball together. We'd take up on Pernod and make all kinds of resolutions. I didn't think anything of them. When I got back, as I say, I looked up Russ Walcott and my already good friend Lee Atwood, and then I went from there to Philip Maher. Meanwhile, Ted went back to school for a year, I went to Philip Maher and Ted and I would once in a while write to one another. I remember making one visit to Yale. I helped arrange a lecture visit for Bucky Fuller at that time and then we had quite a time getting Bucky there. He missed the first appointment. He was going to come and talk about discontinuous compression. He had some models of these suspended compressive things. I remember the dean let us have the entrance hall to Harkness Tower, this was the space just above the main entrance. Ultimately Bucky got there. There was a terrible snowstorm that kept Bucky from getting there the first day. We had to put it off two or three days and finally Bucky came. Imagine, here we had the great Buckminster Fuller and we didn't pay him a cent, not a penny. This

53 happened while Lamb was still at Yale and I had graduated and was back in Chicago working for Russ Walcott. Seeing, at that time, this odd little man that had come into Walcott's office through mutual friends, I guess he was going back to Margaret Fuller, with a little package under his arm—I've got the package too here somewhere in my library, there’s not a written signature but it's Bucky Fuller's first proposal for the Dymaxion house. He gave us each a copy and I have one of them. I don't know what it would be worth to an archivist, I have no idea. It's all typewritten by Bucky—one could only testify to that and claim it—but there's no signature.

Blum: It’s probably worth quite a bit to the Fuller Archives.

Schweikher: Where are they? They're not in Chicago are they?

Blum: I think the material still belongs to the family at this time.

Schweikher: Nobody at Yale knew who Bucky Fuller was, I don't think. There might have been somebody in on the idea that this was some guy but I said, “You ought to listen to this fellow. You ought to see what he' s doing. We're doing a Dymaxion house.” “What's a Dymaxion house?” “Well that's his term for it. It's a house suspended from a staff and built like a Christmas tree and I can get him to come.” He didn't want to bring the house because the model was still being constructed and too complicated to carry. He said, “I’ll bring my discontinuous compression,” which is like a bunch of suspended jacks except the jacks were built large and it's a remarkable thing still to this day. It’s used here and there. It preceded the Dymaxion Dome.

Blum: Who had worked on these projects with Buckminster Fuller?

Schweikher: Lee Atwood, of Russ Walcott's office, was the motivating force. Walcott brought Bucky in, late in the afternoon one day, and said, “I want you to meet a man with some interesting ideas.” Walcott was a remarkable man, lovely man to work for. He shunned all of the things that David Adler

54 stood for. He hung onto Tudor houses because they were easy to do and he didn't have to look around for other things to inspire him. In those days you didn't worry about copying, it was what everybody was doing. You all had a sort of style but it belonged to something else or somebody else.

Blum: This was the summer of 1928-29?

Schweikher: Yes, I'm also going into the thirties I guess, or getting close to it. I think it was 1929-30, something like that. Lamb saw all of this and then I went and had my experience with Philip Maher for about two years. That was a wild experience, it was an experience in which I was both treated quite royally and with respect by Philip Maher but also in his quarrelsome way made to feel my place. He would tell me boastfully in one instance, he’d show me his checks, “Look, this has six figures. Don't you wish you were getting a check with six figures?” Then, promising me, he said, “I will go to Europe.” This is a little aside on Philip Maher, an unpleasant experience for me because I had lots of responsibility. I was the chief designer and he did almost nothing. He had two rather large commissions and one was on Astor Street. There are two buildings there across the street from one another. He did both buildings. The apartments on one side were almost exclusively done by Adler. On the other side they're almost exclusively done by Schweikher for Philip Maher. Some of these took the shape of miniature rooms in the Thorne Collection and part of the collection found its way into the Phoenix Art Museum, for reasons unknown to me.

Blum: Are these the Thorne miniature rooms?

Schweikher: Yes.

Blum: On which ones did you specifically work?

Schweikher: I influenced a few of the others that I can’t identify well enough. One in particular was the one that is credited entirely to Philip Maher. Philip

55 Maher did only about a quarter of it, he did the fireplace but I did the entrance hall with an odd Egyptian type voluted pilasters, the Greek key marble floor and the curving staircase, that's mine.

Blum: Which apartment is that?

Schweikher: I don't know whether that’s still there, that was in the Thorne Collection as a model. I find it in Phoenix marked Philip Maher, no credit given to Schweikher at all. You could say, “Well, that's your comeuppance for copying.” He didn't copy, he had the original author do it and then he just claimed it for his own which he shouldn't really have done.

Blum: Did you work on any specific apartment that has been published?

Schweikher: I was working for Philip Maher at that time. The Sterling Mortons asked Philip to design their apartment. He got about five or six of these people, this was before I knew Suzette Morton. The story of Philip Maher could be probably another story. I designed the Morton’s apartment. I designed probably two or three other apartments while Philip Maher went to Europe. I don't know whether he was a drinker or not, he and I were always talking about being socially connected, but he was going to make me his partner. I had no way of joining him in an investment way, I didn't have that much income. Everything that I received I received from him as salary. It wasn't a very high salary as salaries went, even for chief designers. We had quite a small office which kept getting smaller and smaller because the depression was rapidly crushing us and his big projects were not exactly cancelled, but they were being curtailed, cut down. Things didn't look good with Philip Maher and he began letting people go one by one.

Blum: Who else was in his office with you?

Schweikher: Did you ever hear of Weg? What ever happened to him...maybe Harvard. He was very social on the near North Shore. Philip, I'm sure, wished that he

56 was as social as Weg. Weg was full of snootery, but a lot of fun, a bachelor. There was another person who was quite far to the left politically but had his own house. Weg I only knew as Bud Weg. He had friends at Holabird and Root that he knew. I never saw him again after going out, and I never heard about him again. It was Burt who had a suburban house, very modern, that Philip wouldn't look at. I don't know what happened to Burt. They were two men who had been there most of Philip's professional life. Neither one of them had anything to do with design, they simply drew whatever Philip told them to draw. They talked mostly of the First World War, they were probably ten to fifteen years older than I. There was also a very fat lady who was the secretary. And there was Buford Pickens who later became a teacher at Tulane—I used to play tennis with him, he was a club player. I never became eligible really for top club tennis. He went to Tulane I think and we saw him two or three times after that.

Blum: Are you describing an office of about eight people, a rather small office?

Schweikher: Yes, it was a small office on Ontario or Huron or something. What do you call that area?

Blum: Streeterville?

Schweikher: I think it may have been called Streeterville.

Blum: Earlier, when you were speaking about what you did for Philip Maher as the chief designer, you said your work was not identified as yours. Was it the usual custom in 1931-1933, which were the years you were with Philip Maher, not to give credit to employees?

Schweikher: No public acknowledgement. Philip never introduced me as his designer, if we happened to meet at a party later on, when I began to mix more, at a professional luncheon or something of that sort. I guess I was irked more than if I had just been another designer in the office or another draftsman

57 because then I wouldn't have expected any more. But I knew damn well at that time I was carrying the whole load of design. His position in design was determined entirely by my drawing and I knew it and so did his clients. The only time I ever got any credit, I'm trying to think of the people… I did a direct copy of old Swan, who’d put out a rather fancy tomb somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century, I guess. I took the interiors for the Swan apartment and did a very elaborate thing while Philip was in Europe. This was when Philip was saying, “When I get back we’re going to be partners. You take charge of the design.” He named this fellow that had had the war experience “He's your superintendent, he’ll do everything you say.” He was building a brick house on the South Side that I had designed completely, it was a Georgian take-off. I went ahead with this Swan apartment for George Ranney, I think. I went on with the Morton plans and I didn't have any trouble there. This was before I met Suzy. I got to know her very well, later. Philip came back and blew up, “We didn't say anything to Schweikher, but that won't do at all.” I guess we'd spent about $150,000 at that point on the Ranney apartment. Philip did the shell of the building—this was 1260 Astor. He had done the shell on 1301 Astor. Allerton lived in 1301, as did Abram Poole. “Well, what'll we do?” I guess I said to Philip—I don't really know how that went. Philip came in and said, “We've got to take it all out.” “Look, the stuff is good, it's been paid for. Let's act as architects and tell this guy that it’s good. It's perfectly acceptable.” He said, “All too heavy, your trim is standing.” I knew it because I had seen this stuff in London. I said, “Well, they wanted Georgian. We gave them Georgian. This is Georgian. This isn't just Colonial. This is Georgian, right from England. Defend it.” “No.” There was a lot of swearing that went on between us. “God damn it Paul, you can't do things... God damn it, you've got to learn this!” and so on. I said, “All right. To hell with it. Take it out.” I'd been flirting at that time with Dushkin, he’d been talking about building a music school. His sister-in-law, who was teaching at Smith, had seen my work at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—the thing that Hitchcock and Phil Johnson had done—and she persuaded her brother-in-law that they should pick Schweikher for the

58 Dushkin Music School. There's your next link. It just happened. These things evolve that way. I think Philip wanted to fire me but couldn't quite screw up the courage to tell me point blank. I believe that when I said, “I’m going to leave,” he was probably delighted. The odd part was, I hadn't been unemployed for more than a week when he called me and up and said, “Paul, come back, come back. I want you to come right back.” That was very nice but I had the utter joy—I remember how joyful I was, I joked, cajoled, and laughed—of saying, “No. I ain't coming back.”

Blum: So you left Philip Maher in 1933. What did you do then?

Schweikher: I had the Music School to do on my own.

Blum: May we go back for a moment? During the depression you were in Europe for a year, 1929-30, and then you freelanced between 1930 and 1931. Was this the time that you worked on furniture studies for various workshops with Lee Atwood and with other people who were out of work?

Schweikher: It probably was. I'm quite mixed up about Lee and others in this period. There must have been two periods of Lee Atwood: one having to do with our work together on a variety of things connected with George Fred Keck and Marianne Willisch and the other with Lee’s coming to Dorothy and me to live in the little garage apartment up on Diversey Street. How long Lee lived there I can't remember. I do remember that he brought with him, as a kind of rent I believe, some 200 books, many of which had been bought, with me present, from Georgia, who had her office on the second floor in the Wrigley building.

Blum: Was she a book dealer?

Schweikher: Yes, a rare bookseller. She was well known at the time, a close friend of Lee’s. I had been present with him many times when he was buying these books for the superintendent of Russell Walcott's office. The superintendent

59 was buying the books and Lee—with some arrangement with the superintendent, over which there was quite a squabble later—acquired the books that he had bought for the superintendent. At the time that Lee was buying these books he had little or no money or income and Russ Walcott's superintendent had the money for the books but no knowledge with which to buy them. So, Lee bought them as he would buy also rare recordings of old music. Lee and I saw a lot of one another and times were getting harder and harder for Lee. I had broken completely with Walcott. I was independent of him but dependent I think at that time mostly on Dorothy for income. I can’t remember how Keck and I got together. I don't remember that at all.

Blum: Was it through the furniture venture?

Schweikher: It may have been. Lee Atwood was probably the motivator there in which he knew Marianne Willisch. Lee Atwood ate lunch at the Diana Court building and must at some point have met Marianne who was just getting ready to open an office. She and Lee had me come in and talked to me and we got to talking about doing our own designs. Marianne's idea was to buy the Le Corbusier chairs and put them up in her shop. Lee and I came up with an additional version, we didn’t change that. “How about designing our own stuff?”

Blum: What did you actually design?

Schweikher: Do you mean about designing furniture?

Blum: Yes, designing, merchandising and having the designs executed.

Schweikher: I think we left the merchandising thinking pretty much to Marianne. Lee and I divided up the design duties in a rather simple and quick way. Lee would take on stools and tables and possibly bedsteads. I would do principally chairs and perhaps bookcases and things of that sort. A great many of

60 these studies were made and some still exist. It may be that some of the material that I have represent sketches that I made of chairs and perhaps lamps and lampshades and such bric-a-brac.

Blum: Did George Fred Keck do any designing for this venture?

Schweikher: I can't remember anything that George Fred Keck did in the way of design at that time.

Blum: What happened to the designs or the studies that you and Lee Atwood made? Were they actually executed?

Schweikher: Some of them were made. They are shown in the one and only photographic print that I know of, which I may have had at sometime. There’s only one photographic print of her shop—Marianne must have it. It shows the Atwood table, one of the easy chairs that I did, and a lot of glassware and so on that we had nothing design-wise to do with, but that Marianne had purchased. Lee also worked with Marianne a good bit more than I did. Lee was instrumental in buying a chaise lounge of Le Corbusier, that horizontal, bent metal, chrome-plated piece. I think we also bought a thing or two by Gropius—I think maybe I kept a couple of them and my son owns them now.

Blum: Who executed the furniture designs that you made?

Schweikher: The actual chairs were made by some chair manufacturer that Marianne Willisch must have known—it's possible that Keck or Atwood did this. My recollection is that I was off somewhere because I don't remember anything about the manufacturer of the chairs until I saw them in existence in the shop. I do remember making the design.

Blum: Was Willisch’s Chicago Workshop popular with Chicagoans? Was it patronized well?

61 Schweikher: I don't think so. My guess is that it was not. I think that Marianne felt this as well. I think she was disappointed. I had the feeling in the few times that I saw her that she felt that it was not doing well. There seemed to be no great turnover of the things in the shop.

Blum: Do you think it was because she was selling modern pieces? Was the public reticent to accept modern at that time?

Schweikher: I always thought so. I thought it was out of its time, either too soon or too late, but not in the time.

Blum: Of course it was also the height of the depression, 193031, when money was tight.

Schweikher: The other thing that I understood was that the donor, the supporter of this manufacturing program, had made arrangements with Marianne to supply the place with funding related to what sales were being made. I think that he was beginning to feel that he’d come to the end of that ability. I think we lived in the Marshall Field garden apartments, I'm not certain about that. It was before the Dushkin house, but perhaps not very much before. None of the manufacturing material was available, the only thing that I recall was Sandoval, the wood craftsman, doing, that I knew of…

Blum: Who was Sandoval?

Schweikher: Manuel Sandoval was a discovery in the sense that we had taken this second floor of a garage in back of the apartment on Diversey and remodeled it from a simple loft space and storage space into an apartment. We put in kitchen plumbing, and bath plumbing for one kitchen and one bath and subdivided it into a living room/bedroom and a small library/bedroom and a dining space.

62 Blum: Was this your home or your office?

Schweikher: This was our home, not our office. I was not in practice at all in a drawing sense, except that I may have, once or twice, gone into the basement of the apartment building. There, Charles Eliason and I had rigged up a grinding and polishing plant for handmaking mirrors, astronomical mirrors—these were glass mirrors or “objectives” for small telescopes. We completed one that was eleven inches diameter, approximately, and another that was more than six inches in diameter. Charles was a chief mechanic-engineer and scientist. He followed through in the work with those by taking them up to the roof apartments of the Marshall Field apartments later, which we all moved to. There he practiced amateur star observation in conjunction with Harvard University. So they had a dignified end.

Blum: Why did studying the stars or making a telescope interest you?

Schweikher: Because Charles Eliason asked me to design the carriage for the six-inch telescope following what he could supply me in the way of the suspension of the mirror objective at California.

Blum: An observatory?

Schweikher: Something like Palomar. You saw the house that I designed for Charles in a moment of hilarity. It was to be built out of corrugated sheet metal. I should explain that that was not borrowed or stolen from Schindler, that it originated with us at the time, and used sheet metal in a straight- line/curved-line combination that seemed appropriate for the corrugated steel. That's not a slap at Schindler because I admired Schindler very much. I would have been glad to steal from him at any time.

Blum: Was that house designed at the same time you were working on the telescope carriage?

63 Schweikher: Yes, it was designed at the same time. It was sent to exhibit at the newly formed Museum of Modern Art, which at that time was down in Madison Square, or near Madison Square, on 10th Street in New York. It followed the Sears Roebuck exhibition and had been one of those seen by Johnson and Hitchcock and they asked for it. It was the only architectural work mentioned by the art critic of The New York Times.

[Tape 9: Side 2]* Information between asterisks was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes.

Blum: Would you explain how your work happened to be included in the 1933 Museum of Modern Art exhibition?

Schweikher: I think that the answer to your question began in 1932 when an exhibition was given of our work in Chicago a year earlier. George Fred Keck and Hamilton Beatty from Wisconsin, and I, at the persuasion of a small bookstore on Michigan Avenue, made up a small architectural exhibition for showing in 1932. We all performed properly and the exhibition was held on the second story of this small bookshop—the name I don’t recall—that had its offices and store on Michigan Avenue. That same year I think both Philip Johnson and Russell Hitchcock appeared with their own exhibition to introduce the International Style.

Blum: Was this the 1932 exhibition that was in New York and that then traveled to Chicago?

Schweikher: Yes, I think it was. I was held at what I believe then were new quarters for Sears Roebuck. It was a large area, which we attended later, but somewhere along the line Russell Hitchcock of the two partners in the exhibition effort either called or came to my office. He said that he and Philip had just seen our exhibit at the bookshop. Hitchcock added, “If we’d seen that we wouldn’t have bothered to press so many other Chicago architects to put material into our exhibition. Do you think it’s possible that you could

64 change your exhibition site and put it immediately into ours, which is to open tomorrow?” It was to be the following day. It was not necessary for me to talk to my two partners, I knew that wouldn't work, I knew it wouldn't work for the bookshop and I said no. I can't remember whether Hitchcock countered right then and there but a day or two later, before he left for New York, he said, ''I’ve talked to Philip. We still want your exhibition. What do you think if we plan it for next year?” I said, “I'm sure everybody would be delighted.” That's what happened.

Blum: The works that you exhibited at the bookshop exhibition in 1932 were drawings for the Charles Eliason house, a model for that house, a drawing for a small suburban house adaptable to row house, and the studies you did with George Fred Keck.

Schweikher: Yes, the row house studies were published in the March 1931 issue of Architectural Record.

Blum: Were these the same drawings and model that appeared in the 1933 MOMA exhibition?

Schweikher: I think all or most of them did appear and perhaps we added one or two other studies in the course of the year.

Blum: The Charles Eliason house strikes me as being rather unusual for your work at the time. Is it made of corrugated metal?

Schweikher: Yes, it was corrugated, I suppose. I don't know at that time whether we were thinking of corrugated steel or corrugated aluminum. I'm not sure that corrugated aluminum was fully on the market for that use at any rate. My assumption may have been that it would appear as painted corrugated steel.

Blum: It strikes me as an International Style building. Do you agree with that?

65 Schweikher: I would not differ with that. The interior was, I think, quite International Style. It was a little bit in the manner that Philip Johnson recently said about his AT&T building: “it might have been Chippendale on the exterior but was all Mies on the inside.” On the inside, as we thought of it then, it was rather crisp and transportable, moveable, transferable and so on, with interchangeable style, mechanized cabinet work and so on, which must have been quite close to the things that one or all of us had picked up from various visits to the Weissenhofsiedlung etc.

Blum: Was that your inspiration?

Schweikher: Well, the rectilinear simplicity of it was and perhaps the material itself being mostly in metals, yes.

Blum: Did the house incorporate features that reflected Charles Eliason's interest in observing the sun's movement?

Schweikher: Perhaps the predominant design feature was a half dome to house his telescopes. They were all small telescopes, with very sturdy mountings that required heavy foundations to support them, which were to be provided as the design proceeded. The dome was to have some of the characteristics of the larger observatories in that it could be motorized if necessary and timed with the rotation of the earth and the telescope so that stars could be followed photographically.

Blum: Did your design for the house incorporated anything you learned from your solar studies with Keck?

Schweikher: No, I think that's the only thing that showed up. Most of the rest was the efficiency of the house, which belonged to discussions with Mrs. Eliason that helped form the domestic side of the house. There was no ground or lot at that time. In the general scheme of things this house was to be located on

66 any available simply suburban site.

Blum: One of the other drawings was for a small suburban house adaptable to row houses. Was the row house a solution that you felt was feasible in 1932?

Schweikher: I think that Keck and I both felt the same way. Hamilton Beatty, incidentally, was simply an invited participant and there was no history of working in association with Beatty. Keck and I had discovered all forms of housing, row housing, multiple housing, all of it suburban in character. It had only occurred to me, I think independently, that perhaps there could be a sort of two-way or two-edged solution where the row house could be available for two uses. Building large units economically, where they shared party walls, helps cut down expense and of course shared site development and other mechanical improvements but allows for the purchase of small, individual, independent lots. That's about all there was to it, as I remember it now.* The above information was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes.

[Tape 3: Side 1 continued]

Blum: Was this the time that you did solar studies with George Fred Keck at the Adler Planetarium?

Schweikher: It probably was, I'm not sure. We worked with an assistant to the director, a young man, in the basement at the planetarium building, using crude but effective scaffolding that would permit arrangements of the sun's position for various times of the year and day.

Blum: Why did studying the movement of the sun interest you?

Schweikher: The project done by Keck and I was a block study of row housing—most of it was somewhat in the German pattern, such as Gropius used—placed in

67 positions relative to prevailing winds and the sun's angles. We then arranged cameras for pictures of the model or models that would represent shadow patterns formed by the sun at various hours of the day in various seasons.

Blum: The Architectural Record of March 1933 reported a Chicago housing project that was done by you and George Fred Keck. Was this the one you studied for?

Schweikher: Yes.

Blum: Was this ever built?

Schweikher: No.

Blum: How did you and George Fred Keck come to investigate this housing possibility? Supposedly it was to develop a slum area.

Schweikher: I don't remember Keck's part in this, though it was an interesting part and continuing one. If I recall correctly, most of the drawings and all of the models were built by my assistants and me. I did the photography, together with the assistant at the planetarium. Charles Eliason also took a very active part in this. Charles Eliason was a LaSalle Street broker.

Blum: The Record article talks about the buildings oriented towards the sun, and also about standardized parts used in the building, economy of materials, and certainly economy of construction.

Schweikher: I'm sorry that I don't remember what part Keck took in this, but no doubt an important part, and an important contributor. I was busy with the things that appealed to me.

68 [Tape 3: Side 2]

Blum: When you spoke about Russell Walcott’s office you said that you and Lee Atwood went to movies a lot. What kind of movies did you enjoy?

Schweikher: Let me correct myself if I said we went a lot. We often went to movies that for that time seemed to be important as works of art or historical reference or pertinent in particular to daily life. We viewed the movies, in the first place, as an art form. It would have been a properly critical thing to the limits of our intelligence and what information we had about that art, the art of movie production. Yes, it was to that degree of sophistication and critical observation. It was not an effort to excuse our going. A large share of what prompted us to go was that it was a work of art and we looked at it as we might look at any performance or other that was at an art level. Such movies that seemed to be only entertainment on the surface—for example, The Jazz Singer, was a combination, if I recall correctly, with Al Jolson and The King of Jazz with Paul Whiteman—would have been important not only as entertainment but as a work of art in a new direction, jazz. Jazz was a new major work of art.

Blum: Did you listen to live jazz musicians as well?

Schweikher: Yes, I had a good bit of nightclub attendance. Chicago is a fine place for that sort of thing. We got the best, as you know, from St. Louis, the far West and from the East. We had all the fine band leaders, the best trumpet players, and vocalists.

Blum: Was this something that other architects did as well?

Schweikher: Except for those offices that I was in, I never knew the habits of other architects. That raises the question of how much I saw of other architects. Not much. There was a brief time when I had an interest in the AIA and what it could do to bring some of us together. I credited it at the time with a

69 good bit more of professional influence than it turned out later to have when I became a member.

Blum: When did you become a member?

Schweikher: I don't remember. It must have been some time in the 1930s.

Blum: Were you licensed when you and Ted Lamb became partners in 1933-34?

Schweikher: I believe that my registration in Illinois was dated 1938. That was my Illinois registration. That was then followed in succession, up until the time of the NCARB, with a variety of registrations in fourteen or fifteen states.

Blum: What is the NCARB?

Schweikher: It’s the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, of which I was a member for a great many years. But now in my eighties, I have dropped almost all of those memberships. I’m keeping only the state of Illinois, and as I recall, Pennsylvania and Arizona. There are special privileges now granted to eighty-year-olds in the registration field. I've taken advantage of whatever they were. Some of them are simply gratis registration for the rest of your life, I guess.

Blum: Did I understand you correctly to say that you felt the AIA was more important to an architect than you came to believe subsequently?

Schweikher: Less important. That's my opinion. My guess is, without knowing, that many chapters feel more responsible locally than it was my experience to have. In Chicago I felt that the AIA as a professional association should have more public responsibility and that we should assume more professional responsibility to the public and make it known and make it felt. Where ethics or public safety such things were concerned I felt the Chicago chapter of the AIA, or any chapter of the AIA, should assume

70 some responsibility and make its opinions known. To a degree this was done and probably still is done. I still have the feeling that the voice of the AIA as a professional organization is comparatively weak. I would compare it with other professional organizations such as the AMA, etc. It's weak ethically and it's weak technically.

Blum: Can you cite an instance that would demonstrate what you’re talking about? One in which, perhaps, you were personally involved?

Schweikher: There were one or two that affected me that are relatively unimportant and my reaction then was perhaps an overreaction. In one there was an opportunity to display at the AIA chapter headquarters some miniature drawings by Erich Mendelsohn that he would have been happy to send to us. I got angry because the then-president of the Chicago chapter was assuming authority with a personal bias—his feeling was that having such a show would be controversial. The reason apparently was because of the strong political disturbance in Israel at the time and, of course, Mendelsohn was a Jew. Apparently that was the reason the work of a Jewish architect on display in the local chapter of the AIA would have been a challengeable act.

Blum: Was this one of the instances that contributed to your resignation?

Schweikher: Yes, I felt strongly then about such things and acted on them. Today I think I still feel as strongly, but my actions are slower, my reactions are slower and I perhaps wouldn’t have resigned, except that there were other instances that annoyed me in the local framework. One of the instances was over the insistence on the part of the Kroehler manufacturing people and Marshall Field to put furniture into a house that I had designed for a small and temporary exhibition on the grounds of the 1893 world's fair. They wanted to put some Grand Rapids furniture in it that would have conflicted with the building and other furniture that I had designed for the house. I appealed to the officers of the Chicago chapter—I think I was on

71 the board at the time—for some assistance and I can't remember what kind of answers I got. I do remember that I got no assistance in objecting or making my objections clear. I went to Marshall Field’s and pounded the table and left in a huff and the notice came out in the local press that Schweikher had been kicked out of Marshall Field’s. The headline was something like, “Architect Removed Forcibly,” but that wasn't so.

Blum: How did you want to furnish it?

Schweikher: I had my own designs. I was for freestanding chairs and things. I can't remember now, it may easily have been that I had in mind a chair or two, either a new design that has long ago disappeared from my files or it may have been part of the little Vienna-type workshop that we had with Marianne Willisch. I don't know that for sure.

Blum: This all refers to the Structural Clay Products exhibition house that you designed for the fair in Chicago in 1950?

Schweikher: Yes. I had been a developer—I think I was alone in this for a while—of Chicago common sewer brick as a structural brick for inexpensive houses. To the point, as I understood it, that the Structural Clay Products people began to fire that same clay slightly differently to give it more durability and resistance. Later it became known as Sunset Brick. Some years ago now, maybe ten to fifteen years ago, I was given to understand that the brick was still on the market as Sunset Brick. That which was used in my Roselle house and a number of other houses was a so-called Sunset Brick and was quite handsome.

Blum: Did you over take any patents out on any of the work that you did?

Schweikher: No, I was never very good at patents. When patents did occur, as in my washing machine designs for 1900 Corporation, the company took out the patents in my name. That’s as much as I ever knew about it. Their fees were

72 incidentally scandalously low, as compared to today. Perhaps a tenth to a twentieth of what they are now.

Blum: You resigned from the AIA because of conflict...

Schweikher: Mostly it was because of the inability of my colleagues to join with me in making small, but forceful, remonstrances or other objections to things that were unethical or lacked architectural or artistic merit. I had the feeling in those days that it was a delightful group to be with and we had some fine drinking parties and we talked nonsense together. But, when it came to public action as a body representing the profession, I thought at that time that we were a bunch of weaklings without conviction, without principle. We were simply a little pleasant social group without purpose.

Blum: Would you speak about the Architects’ Balls sponsored by the AIA that you enjoyed?

Schweikher: The two parties, the architectural balls—one at the Drake in 1936 and the later the one at the Trianon in 1937—were delightful. They were without purpose other than to indicate that professional groups could have a lot of fun and could do things in an attractive way. I was active on committees for both of those parties, first as one of the many designers in the first one at the Drake, and then as the head of design at the Trianon.

Blum: What did you design for the ball at the Drake Hotel?

Schweikher: It didn’t take very long. We had the entrance lobby with its changeable fireplace-fountain to work with, so we cut out the fireplace, made the pool as big and as deep as we could, put a podium in the center, and had a parade of nude beautiful girls go one by one, half an hour apiece. It almost literally brought down the house. The entering males couldn't follow the pedestrian path around the pool left for them but insisted constantly on crossing through the center of the pool.

73 Blum: Were the women in the pool?

Schweikher: The women were on pedestals and there was a kind of general rush for the center pedestal. They were always treated gently, but everybody got a good soaking in the middle of the pool and some of the girls were not very pleased and left, others saw that it was harmless and just good fun and stayed. A good time was had by all.

Blum: Who were some of the other architects who worked with you in planning this ball?

Schweikher: I can't remember. I think that such people as Al Shaw and Nat Owings and people from the Holabird and Root office, and from Philip Maher's office perhaps. I've forgotten now, I don’t remember. I’d like to bring in more names, but I can't remember. The Pereiras, if I remember correctly, helped get the girls. Nat Owings helped get the work done and the contributions. The following year when it was again a matter of girls dominating the picture. Al Shaw suggested Venus on the half-shell as a theme and we then completed the grouping with diaphanous columns each five or six feet in diameter and perhaps fifteen feet high, as high as the ballroom, with girls inside again. The parade was, of course, with Venus on the half-shell, all done in rather typical Hollywood style, ornate, lots of color, lots of jazz.

Blum: Was this ball named “Afternoon of the Gods”?

Schweikher: Yes, I think that was Al’s name for it, “An Afternoon with a God”.

Blum: What did architects and their wives and companions wear to such balls?

Schweikher: To me, the ball at the Trianon was nowhere near as varied or exciting as the one at the Drake. There were many periods represented in the Drake Hotel. The classical theme dominated and so many of the gals came in long white

74 gowns and some of the men wore robes and so on. One popular costume was what was imagined to be slave costumes with skirt-like shorts and work blouses and bobbed wigs. I remember a great many of Dorothy's docs came dressed that way. They were quite laughable and lots of fun. There was lots of heavy makeup at the Trianon, far more than the Drake which had pleasant, amusing costumes of the 1870s and 1880s—hard hats, straw hats, and things of that kind, and vests. Does that give you any kind of idea? About the place of the AIA and the local chapters and so on—I don't recall that it directly affected or called upon the AIA in any way. Undoubtedly there were many members of the AIA that came to the ball and I don' t think there was any objection on the part of the AIA to a fancy dress ball or clownish ball. It was a typical architectural activity. The engineers came from the engineering societies and certainly the professional societies furnished members but not as societies. I don’t know whether the AIA voted money toward the expense of the balls. I think most of that was taken care of by such people as Nat Owings and others who were able to persuade many of the builders, contractors, and materials people to come as guests but also to help pay expenses. That's the way I understood it.

Blum: In 1939, as a member of the AIA, you were the director of the Chicago chapter school. What was that?

Schweikher: I think that Jerry Loebl was president of the chapter at that time and I think it was primarily a child of his brain and a well-intended and well-meaning one. He had asked me if I would act as the instructor and director of this school. Neither of us thought it would be very big but we would make it especially available to draftsmen and/or architectural students in or out of school. The school that I’m talking about is the chapter school. The classroom for it was a rented classroom in the Pelouze Building, which was where Popular Mechanics magazine was located. Whether it was still occupied by Popular Mechanics I don't know, I think it was going vacant. Later a floor or two was taken over by Mies van der Rohe, that’s my memory of it.

75 Blum: How many students were enrolled?

Schweikher: If we had half a dozen students then we had as many as I can remember. Maybe we had a dozen at the beginning. The program was done rather quickly. I informally made up graphic exercises for a certain amount of discourse, some of which I guess I ventured. I can't remember what other teachers we may have had… I remember that Rainey Bennett, the watercolor painter, was one of them. I can't believe that we met more than two or three times.

Blum: Do you remember any of the students?

Schweikher: I don't remember any of the students.

Blum: 1939 seems to be the same year that you taught a course at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I think that that school was titled the Chicago School of Architecture. Was that affiliated with Armour Institute?

Schweikher: No. Norman Rice was the director at the School of the Art Institute who asked me. I can't remember whether that was contemporaneous with the AIA chapter school, which I would have called Jerry Loebl’s inspiration. We did what we could but there was little or no money. I guess we probably paid rent out of chapter funds, but the rent was quite low. We required almost no equipment other than perhaps some crude drawing paper, a drawing board or two with an inexpensive easel and a few stools, and the electric light bill as an additional cost. At the Art Institute school, I was simply a visiting instructor who came into a class that was already formed, as I understood it. It was a class in architectural drawing. I gave some problems of geometry that were helpful in examining the use of the T-square and triangle and the compass and such things. We concerned ourselves with rather dry little problems of making diagrams of pentagons, polygons, squares and triangles. That was all there was to that class. I was all alone; I

76 didn't really have charge of the class. They were just students in that class trying to acquaint themselves with mechanical instruments.

Blum: An architect who has spoken to me about taking that class with you remembers a farm problem you gave to the class.

Schweikher: That's very possible.

Blum: It seems that soon after that you published some sort of solution with Bill Fyfe and Joe Salerno in Architectural Forum in October 1940.

Schweikher: Yes we did and I guess it was Architectural Forum that published it. It was “The Linear Farm,” in which we began the food and fodder at different ends of a long mechanical chain. Then, by the time you got to the other end it was milk or grain or whatever. I didn't realize that that ever found its way into that school but it’s possible that it did. What’s being revealed to me by this interview is that I've forgotten a lot more than I thought I have.

Blum: Was the thought behind these schools, either the AIA class or the one at Art Institute, to promote contemporary design?

Schweikher: There was nothing that I know of in the way of design theory or the theory of practice in architecture in the class at the Art Institute. That was a simple, direct application of learning how to handle instruments. I didn't know whether I was working with promising architects or promising painters. I think they were painters, people who wanted to paint, draw and perhaps there were one or two who thought of this as a course in engineering or architecture that required mechanical drawing.

Blum: Do you recall who was in that class?

Schweikher: Not a soul. I had a great many conflicting interests at the time. I don’t even remember why I took the job. About all I can remember about it was that it

77 was rather formless. I think that the director didn't know what character it should take and I needed somebody to tell me what its purpose was. The Art Institute was trying to become a good school in the arts but I wasn’t satisfied with picking a practicing architect to direct it, without any instruction other than that was quite the way to go about it. I was probably a rather uncertain director and teacher. I really wasn’t the director at all. If Rice looked in on me, he may have looked in on me once only. That would not have been his fault, it was simply I think that he must have had orders or directions from somewhere else to begin such a school. He began it without a proper study of what it should be, that’s my guess.

Blum: What architectural magazines or journals did you read?

Schweikher: I think I began with Architectural Record. I guess for a while my favorite was Architectural Forum. How these came in the timeframe, as the modern term is, I don't remember clearly. I wasn't very long in my practice before some of my own projects were published. I think maybe one of the earliest projects was the small church in Austin. A man by the name of Talbot Hamlin, I believe, did a critical article on it that was laudatory. That made me a friend of the magazine. I probably subscribed to that.

Blum: Hamlin’s article was published in Pencil Points in February 1940. Throughout your career you were very well published. How did that happen?

Schweikher: I don't know how that happened. I can’t recall just what happened about that. When Bill Fyfe was in the office he brought in a small house project, which we did, and we entered it. But I think Bill wanted to do it and it was really his house and his design. I can't remember that I contributed much to it. It was a very nice, small design with a certain small Wrightian influence but with an imaginative contribution by Bill in that it had warm air circulating through a masonry floor and the introduction of fresh outdoor air through louvers beneath fixed windows. These are all contributions of

78 Bill's and really made the house work.

Blum: This was in 1941, it was the Lewis house in Park Ridge, and it was selected the as the “House of the Year.”

Schweikher: That's possible. It got a prize and a publication and whether that stirred the interest of other magazines I don't recall. The only thing I can say here is that at no time did we—that means any of us in the office, especially me—ever solicit a magazine or call up anyone to ask them if they would be interested in publishing our work. We never did that. Usually we would get letters. I could remember some of the editors ultimately, there was Douglas Haskell, Howie Myers, and the man after Hamlin, who took over the successor to Pencil Points.

Blum: Do you mean Progressive Architecture?

Schweikher: Yes, Progressive Architecture. Tom Creighton, Katherine Ford, these were various editors who wrote to me in person. There was also someone from the Museum of Modern Art, probably following the visit that we had at the time of the Johnson-Hitchcock show at Sears, Roebuck.

Blum: They wrote to you for what reason?

Schweikher: They wrote asking if we would like to submit material for publication in the magazine. We began to send a project now and then. At first they were interested only in pictures of work that had been built. Howie Myers suggested showing work in progress, so we sent them drawings of work around the state of Illinois. By that time Elting was in partnership. Then came—who was the editor later?—at any rate he was editor. At the time that he wrote to me asking me to prepare a projection campus design. We were at that time working on the State University of New York in Buffalo. They published a rather long article on that, together with our drawings, it was that kind of thing. Two or three of the magazines developed a habit of

79 writing us once a month to see what we had. Town and Country published quite a few things, including my house, my neighbor’s house, and two or three other houses that were suitable for their town and country relationship. I had many interests in foreign magazines that don't appear there. I was very fond of the English magazines.

Blum: Whom did you use as the photographer for your work?

Schweikher: Hedrich-Blessing for most work in the Middle West. That would be the states surrounding Illinois, as well as Illinois. For the Southwest I think we had once or twice used Ezra Stoller. For Eastern stuff I think it was Molitor. These were all top photographers.

Blum: When you worked with the Hedrich-Blessing studio, who was the photographer on the job?

Schweikher: Usually Bill Hedrich.

Blum: Did you work with him to set up the photographs?

Schweikher: I think Ken may have done the first project with us, or it might have been Ken with Bill present, but from then on it was almost always Bill. If there was a change in personnel, I still probably thought of him as being Bill. As time went by I wasn't always present with the photographer. Initially I liked to be there because I found that the photographer, early on, as the modern expression is, used to say, “You can't take it all.” This was especially Bill Hedrich's way of trying to teach me that you couldn't take in all of the project. At first I was impressed by that, but then later I came to insist that we arrange the picture in such a way that it showed what I wanted to see. Sometimes I was trying to say something about the building or I was thinking that the building was saying something to me that I wanted the picture to show. I would override the photographer's wish to produce a masterpiece of his own in order to say about the building what I thought I

80 should. I was a nuisance to many photographers in later years.

[Tape 4: Side 1]

Blum: During 1930-31, when you were freelancing, was this the time in your career when you designed products for industry?

Schweikher: I think that's so, approximately, although it's only honest to say that I've lost track of the specific time and into which slot it may fit. I think I did that. Some of it was in connection with the Willisch workshop. I recall talking to one of the representatives, possibly the buyer or at least the Chicago representative of a Grand Rapids manufacturer of moderate priced furniture.

Blum: What I had in mind was the stove design and the washing machine design you designed for industry.

Schweikher: The washing machine design was not related to the furniture design or the Willisch project. That was a separate operation. It came through the display—this also helps date it—of prize winners in the General Electric competition in 1935. Lou Upton, president of the 1900 Corporation, which manufactured the Whirlpool line for Sears, Roebuck, called me to say that he had seen the house in the magazine and would like to have Lamb and I do one just like it for him in Arizona. We said we most certainly would. He made an appointment with me to go to Scottsdale to look at the lots that he owned there and to return to discuss plans for a house made of adobe and redwood. We did this and the house was built. I can't remember clearly but somewhere along the way—how much time passed I don’t know—Louis Upton had occupied the house, Beth's sister and her husband had occupied the house when the Uptons couldn't. That sister was Fannie. The sister to Beth and Fannie was Margaret Mead, the anthropologist. Shortly before the war, Louis Upton asked if I would be interested in doing some industrial design. I said, “Yes I'll try that.” I then sat with the

81 manufacturers and sales representatives in St. Joseph, Michigan, discussing changes or possible changes in the Whirlpool line. We designed that line and redesigned it for two or three years just prior to the war. I stopped work on industrial design in order to give my attention to my enrollment in the Navy.

Blum: So you designed for industry in the early 1940’s?

Schweikher: Yes, it was. And now we have a date.

Blum: In 1933 the Century of Progress International Exposition opened. How did you participate in the Century of Progress?

Schweikher: I was about to say the only participation I had was in going to the fair, which is closer to the truth than anything else that I might say. Except that somewhere, in this whole line of employment, I became a member of the drafting force of General Houses. I can't remember why or when. My assignment, given to me by Howard Fisher, was that I be in charge of the development of a house that was not in steel or metal of any kind but in wood. I worked in an area called the “backroom” designing what was to be a prefabricated house. Whether this was the time that I also did some side work on a house for the Celotex Corporation I can't remember. The president, who was staying at the Drake Hotel, called me one day and interviewed me in his pajamas about the design of a wood house for the Celotex Corporation.

Blum: There are drawings for the study of the Celotex Corporation house that are dated 1934.

Schweikher: I spent some time on that. This may have been contemporaneous with the General Houses work or not, I can't remember.

Blum: Did the wood house you designed for General Houses ever get built?

82 Schweikher: I don't know the answer. Celotex may have designed it without consulting with me further. They had the planning and detail materials from me with which to work. As far as the General Houses house is concerned, I think it was never built. I'm not sure that we even arrived at a point of completed working drawings.

Blum: Who else was employed by General Houses?

Schweikher: They were far to numerous to mention. There were a few. One of our consultants was Bob Weinberg of New York. And there were Larry Perkins and Phil Will.

Blum: Did they work on the wood house with you?

Schweikher: No. They were not in the backroom. They were still in another opinion and in another opinion room. This was the nature of General Houses, which was populated by earnest, serious, intelligent, thoughtful people, most of whom appeared not to have other work to do and most of whom were somewhat uncertain as to what they should do in this circumstance.

Blum: Howard Fisher has been described as a hero because he employed young architects who needed work. He had a new idea about a solution to the housing problem and that was to use prefabricated housing. Did the prefabricated solution appeal to you?

Schweikher: I hadn’t ever asked myself that question in that way. I might have answered it by saying the chances are it did not appeal to me. As an idea it appealed to me, but as far as our solution to the idea was concerned, I thought that it was not the best solution.

Blum: Why?

83 Schweikher: It was not monolithic enough. It turned out to be an assemblage of parts. One could identify their counterpart in masonry, concrete, steel, and wood which may or may not have taken more or less labor. If one added up the skills of the carpenter, mason, welder and so on, the chances were that so much complexity still existed in this prefab house that it offset any gain in economy or ease of construction. Furthermore, many things remained unchanged such as the water supply, sewer, electric power, heat sources in general, foundation, resistance to overturn and collapse, adaptation to sun and wind positions, and so on. I thought of this a good bit and that probably is one of the reasons why I left rather early in the operation. Perhaps I stayed long enough to see two examples built: one at the Century of Progress in 1933 or 1934, and one for Ruth Page and Tom Fisher somewhere on the North Shore on a lot that they owned.

Blum: In the Hubbard Woods section in Winnetka?

Schweikher: Yes, I think so. I can't remember exactly where it was. Although I went there, I don't know that I identified my location when I was there. The other house, I think, was one that we built near Libertyville for Adlai Stevenson.

Blum: How do you remember Howard Fisher?

Schweikher: As a pleasant, intelligent man devoted to an idea. Later, I knew him as a new and casual friend. I think we weren't fortunate enough to have the time to have him as a guest at our house but we did go once to his place for dinner or something of the sort and a visit with the family.

Blum: Getting back to the Century of Progress, what was your opinion of the design of the buildings?

Schweikher: Let me answer another question about that for the moment. I don’t remember, and I can't think of what would help my memory to recall what the objectives of the fair were. Perhaps that's an answer, because it seemed

84 to me that other than as entertainment there was very little else. I doubt that it made money. I can’t believe that it did, since some of the projects that I knew about were unexpectedly expensive. But it was a great amount of fun. I don't think it pointed to any direction. It had something of the future in it.

Blum: Did George Fred Keck’s Crystal House or the House of tomorrow, impress you?

Schweikher: I only saw the Crystal House and the House of Tomorrow as finished structures. I had only a little view of their work in the drafting room. I do not remember taking part in any of the actual drawing. Somebody has credited me with helping them in that work but I can't recall having done any of it. I do know that I was in the office frequently talking about this or that planning virtue or detailing objective, but I was not an active part in doing any of it. I can’t think that I did any drawing and I can't think that I did any advising. I was not really prepared for either one. I was interested in discussing the possibility of incorporating some of Buckminster Fuller’s ideas, if possible. Fuller, if my memory serves me, was quite available for direct consultation. Maybe Keck and Atwood talked with him, I don't know that for sure. They must have talked at some point about having Bucky’s automobile be a part of the exhibit because it was made a part of it. It had that most unfortunate tragic accident that didn't help matters. And Atwood described what he was doing: one example was taking a woodblock floor and turning it at right angles and making a vertical wall out of it and that seemed pleasantly innovative without any other purpose than a visual one.

Blum: Was this for one of the houses at the Century of Progress?

Schweikher: Yes, but that was not the House of Tomorrow. I don't think it was called the House of Tomorrow. If I remember, the House of Tomorrow was octagonal or pentagonal—I've forgotten what the shape of it was—but it

85 was a regular polygon in plan. The other was square, I believe, a cube in form, essentially a glass block.

Blum: Did that strike you as an innovative house?

Schweikher: No, it was built out of open truss joists which were used in almost all the inexpensive, small structures. They had come in as a popular addition. They were used everywhere.

Blum: In 1933 were there homes that were being commissioned in such a style?

Schweikher: No, I don't think there were many homes like that. I guess I hadn't come to the bumpity school yet—the school of bumpity stone, as the form called it—in which we used them almost exclusively as ceiling structures, but that may have come considerably later. I can't remember what the date of that was, after the war I guess. That must have been ten years later perhaps. You'll see that in the Eliason house, which was exhibited in New York and in the show at the Museum of Modern Art. The Eliason house had, as a part of its structure, the open webbed joist. It was very carefully drawn on the interior perspective.

Blum: So am I correct to assume that in your opinion the Century of Progress did not exert...

Schweikher: It offered little or nothing new.

Blum: Do you think it was a political farce?

Schweikher: No. I think that's probably true of almost all fairs, except possibly, if one goes back to the St. Louis fair… I was too young to be present.

Blum: Why does that fair strike you as an exception?

86 Schweikher: There were special innovations and architectural innovations within a style that perhaps carried on beyond the slowly developing urban large-scale architecture. A lot could be said about it but not without going into considerable architectural detail. Subsequent fairs seemed pointed more to entertainment than to scientific or professional development.

Blum: In terms of enjoyment what did you enjoy about the fair?

Schweikher: Drinking.

Blum: Did you meet colleagues or people whom later became colleagues?

Schweikher: No., I don’t think I met colleagues. I met people with whom I became better acquainted later, professionally. Among them were Skidmore and Owings. I had met John Merrill earlier. You asked at one point whom I knew in the Lowe and Bollenbacher office or in the Granger and Bollenbacher office. Did I mention John Merrill, who was the engineer in that office? He must therefore have been, at least in the early days, the engineer for Skidmore and Owings. I didn't meet him necessarily at the fair, nor did I really meet either Skidmore or Owings at the fair, but I met their influence and presence and examples of some of their work. Later and sometime during that time or immediately after the fair, I was surprised to receive in our new small Chicago office Nat Owings as a guest. He showed me pictures of the design of an interior for the Fairbank Company, to ask my opinion about its design. I think I was as surprised with the visit as Nat was in making it. I don't know why he made it and I never found out. Odd. We met a number of times later on various projects and juries but we never became well acquainted.

Blum: In 1933-34 you and Ted Lamb got together and formed your partnership. How did that happen?

Schweikher: Sometime in 1933 I had a card or short letter from Ted addressed to me

87 from Mexico, I think it was, saying that he was on his way back from an architectural tour, an automobile tour of Mexico. He wrote that he would like to come in and see me shortly after he arrived, which he did. The purpose, apparently, was to suggest that he and I work together as a team. He was thinking of the practice of architecture and he said that he would be happy to work with me in my location, which was my apartment. I was in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments where we had two small bedrooms, a dining room that opened into a living room, a kitchen, and of course a bath. We went ahead and set it up that way and Ted came to the apartment and we began work on such things as the General Electric competition. Somewhere in that time—I can't remember now whether I had already finished drawings for Dushkin or not—drawings for the Dushkin house were done and some drawings were done for a house for Ted Lamb's mother and a house for his sister.

Blum: When your partnership with Ted Lamb was formed did you discuss mutual goals and methods?

Schweikher: That's a nice question to ask me but I don't think our architectural intelligence had developed very much up to that time. We probably thought we had goals and objectives. If we did, we worked a while without putting them into words, other than the words that were necessary to make a drawing or to describe a scheme. Then when Architectural Forum invited us to submit photographs and prints of our work either finished or in preparation we made a small summary of ideas as a kind of preface.

Blum: Was that published in November of 1939?

Schweikher: Yes. I tried to put it in that “Who Done It?” style and they garbled it all up, made a mess of it, that contemporary architecture. I said, “It seems to me that it's still applicable.” With that they then must have thrown it around the studio because it certainly came out a mess, absolutely unintelligible.

88 Blum: Nevertheless, I think four or five interesting points about goals were made in this article. You wanted to enclose the space economically, to use suitable and natural materials with a great point made of using no synthetics, and you wanted the solution to be based on siting, nature, and the client's needs. The important point I think you made was that it must be a contemporary solution. When did you break with the traditional approach in favor of the contemporary solution? Of course today your reputation is that of an early proponent of contemporary solutions, so called modern. When did that all happen?

Schweikher: Just in the course of building buildings.

Blum: In the 1930s?

Blum: Yes. I'd have to count the buildings as they happened. That's a long task and would bore me as well as perhaps the reader.

Blum: In the Forum article, the Loewenstein house in Highland Park is cited. Do you consider that a contemporary solution?

Schweikher: Yes, I did. But again, the only thing that I had summed up were the use of materials, not necessarily natural materials, it didn’t have to be natural stone, it didn’t have to be wooden logs or bark, but I wanted to use them as straightforwardly as possible. Instead of painting brick after it was in place, I wanted to let the color of the brick stand. Instead of staining wood with dark stains, protect it with preservatives, we wanted to let the natural color of the wood stand for itself. It was just a kind of simplicity and directness that we hoped to introduce. As to spatial function and spatial theories, we agreed with most of the principles that had been expressed either by Wright or by Mies van der Rohe or somewhere in between by others. Those principles had to do with using glass as a transparency to control temperature change but not a visual space divider, as an example. Using masonry and wood as structural material rather than as decorative

89 material, etc.

Blum: In that statement of your philosophy it seems that you almost disdain the practice of identifying the style of a building. The statement reads, “We find little need for serious discussion of the building’s style.” Is that so?

Schweikher: Yes, I guess so, at that time I did. I guess that's been our practice somewhat, not to develop a Frank Lloyd Wright philosophy, Mies never really did, and Johnson theorized a good bit. Other than saying, “Less is more,” Mies was constantly simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, Where's this coming from? ...from Thoreau or somebody. Let me say something that is going to sort of float in the air: I've been asked about a recent restatement concerning plagiarism, in particular the copying the plan of a small house designed by Harwell Hamilton Harris. I think that the restatement is as sophomoric as the first statement. Copying is a frequent constituent of the design process. Sometimes the copying is verbatim and adds nothing. Many times, however, it is an improvement over the original and is obviously progress.

Blum: Are you referring to the house design with which you and Lamb won the 1935 GE competition? At the time it raised some criticism.

Schweikher: Criticism of our house design that won the GE competition might have been more appropriate or better applied to the subject of whether or not the copying was an improvement of the original or failed to make any progress whatsoever. An ad-lib to this is that historically we have learned to accept copying of old monuments. Why may we not similarity accept intelligent, clever, amusing or effective copying of contemporary work? Look again, for example, at the two plans.

Blum: At your GE competition design and the Lowe house by Harris?

Schweikher: Right. The bare bones of the Harwell Hamilton Harris plan appear in the

90 plan of our house designed by Lamb. However, Harwell Hamilton Harris appears to have derived his plan from the Japanese habit, whereas Lamb is intent upon reproducing a house more easily identified with the Mediterranean style. The copying therefore takes a relatively unimportant position in the design process. We could continue with this argument indefinitely.

Blum: In the flow of your career winning the 1935 GE grand prize was important. Did it bring you attention and commissions? For instance, the Third Unitarian Church was a 1936 commission. How did you get that job?

Schweikher: I think that came out of my acquaintance with the Fyfes. It may have been at the time that William was working with me and I think that it was his mother, father, or William himself who brought in the commission. That's not unusual in architectural offices.

Blum: Did you feel that the Third Unitarian Church was a successful solution for the problem?

Schweikher: Wasn't there a man by the name of Johnson for whom I built a house a little farther south than the University of Chicago? It was somewhere on what was originally the elevated lines, somewhere out in that area. It's a very polite house, a house that takes its flavor from the work of George Maher, deliberately. I was never accused by anybody of copying George Maher. I think the man’s name was Johnson.

Blum: Was this the David Johnson house?

Schweikher: Yes, the David Johnson house.

Blum: Was he the contractor for the Third Unitarian Church?

Schweikher: I think that Johnson was the contractor for the Third Unitarian Church of

91 Chicago, which was done in the “Modern Swedish” style. It was inspired by my observation of the work, being in and around Stockholm at the time on a recent visit to Europe.

Blum: That church has been cited many times as being a modern urban solution with sincerity and with a direct use of natural materials. This seems very consistent with your statement of philosophy.

Schweikher: It’s interesting to me personally. It marked a change in my career from draftsman to colleague of David Adler's. While acting in a jury of peers we walked out into the elevator corridor and David Adler turned to me…[tape ends]

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Blum: That must have been quite a compliment coming from a man you admired so much.

Schweikher: Well, it was, it was a compliment. At the same time I thought of Adler's struggle with his very fine house done for Bill Clow in Lake Forest.

Blum: In 1936 also you had the Dushkin house commission. How did you get that?

Schweikher: Dushkin came through the Eliasons. Dorothy Dushkin was sister to Trudle Smith who persuaded her husband to talk to me about a house and studio. Trudle, after having seen the 1933 exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, thought that was that.

Blum: What was your client/architect relationship like with Dushkin?

Schweikher: David Dushkin was an easy client to work with because he gave me his requirements and left me alone. But he was a difficult client when it came to

92 the finished house.

Blum: What do you mean?

Schweikher: He expected something more of the house than it was ready to accommodate. As an example, early on he went to bed—it was both a house and a workshop—and left the basement windows open. The basement was the principle location of the workshop in which Dushkin had stored all his fine veneers, hardwood, rare woods, to be made into violins and flutes. A violent summer thunderstorm started early in the night, and continued until about three o'clock, when David called me to tell me that his house was under water. After some debate about the difficulty of getting there, I left at high speed to arrive an hour or so later. When I got there, I found that Dushkin was correct, the house was indeed in deep water. Some of the violins were floating and many of the flutes had already sunk. Looking around the exterior walls I discovered that the transom windows to the areaways were almost without exception open and the water was streaming in the windows and down the walls.

Blum: Was that an unnerving experience for you?

Schweikher: I don't know that I was unnerved by what I saw. But I was definitely puzzled as to whether David accepted this kind of water inlet as a norm for the house’s function or whether he was shocked by the apparition. His face showed no sign of emotion. There was an immediate response to action in which windows were slammed shut and locked and the cataract diminished with no further word as to my culpability. There were later developments, not David’s fault but the fault of the contractor, in following the detail for the exterior terrace at the south end of the house, in which further leakage occurred. David said, “See, there you are, the house does leak.” Surely enough, it was necessary to remove the brick paving and redo the waterproofing. Meanwhile, we had one other disagreement or circumstance in which David had called me, again on short notice, for a

93 speedy correction to indicate to me that the hot water in the shower would not turn on. The inspection and the solution came quickly, David stepping into the tub as he demonstrated to me that the shower indeed did not work. He turned it on full and was hit with a full flood of water that came down on his newly pressed suit. He immediately apologized. I left for home. That's about the end of the Dushkin story. I don't think this is anything to add—dear David never really understood the Indian character in the wood screen.

Blum: Do you mean in the pattern of the screen?

Schweikher: Yes, I couldn't blame him for this. I think he ultimately removed the screen. The reason was that it had a repetition of the Indian swastika and David couldn't take it. I said, “Stop thinking of it as a Nazi swastika.” As a Russian Jew I guess that he simply had to say to me, “I cannot stand it.” Of course, in those days I didn't know enough about the atrocious quality of the Hitler performance. I had certainly heard of it. It was so atrocious that one couldn't believe it in those days.

Blum: That was 1936 when this was happening.

Schweikher: It was so god-awful as the news came. No photographs were available for quite a long time. David stood it about as long, I guess, as he could emotionally. I don't know whether the house is still there. If it is... it's too bad they don’t... Well, maybe they've torn the whole damn thing out. But it needed this little wooden adornment.

Blum: Was the pattern inspired by a Mexican trip you had recently taken?

Schweikher: No, but I think it's also a North American Indian pottery device. I'd have to go up to Northern Arizona University to find out what its derivation is.

Blum: Will you speak a little bit about your 1936 Mexican trip? Did that affect

94 your ideas about architecture?

Schweikher: No. I think the first Mexican trip… I can't remember how many…

Blum: This seems to be the first.

Schweikher: Yes, probably, it was by automobile I think. No, I think we took the first Mexican trip with the Eliasons in which we took the good old Southern Pacific and transferred to one of those things that Thoreau talks about, the trains that go all the way to Patagonia, a whole succession of them. We took only the first line, in the days when there was still some chance that you might have the track blown out from under you, but it wasn't. We had a most delightful trip, probably more delightful than the Mexican train trips are today, if I understand correctly. Although, the constabulary was in evidence and films were frequently confiscated, inspected and destroyed. The meals were good and the linen was clean. The trains were not air- conditioned, of course, at that time. We were traveling in reasonably comfortable weather so there was no trouble there. We went down the West Coast through what I recall as being the Valley of a Thousand Smokes and on to Guadalajara, and then from Guadalajara to Mexico City. We went then up as far as the two towns, not far away from one another and not as far as Oaxaca, but to Taxco and Cuernavaca. We enjoyed primarily Mexican food, dancing, and such things as that, simply Mexico. It was well before the new museum. We did see the old dusty settings of the original museum in Mexico City. We went to the sinking theatre and visited the cathedral and at that time saw nothing of the ancient pre-Columbian work. We bought Mexican tinware at Sanborn’s and ate ice cream at Sanborn's, and drank Mexican beer. That was really our first trip, which was quite non-architectural I think. It was with the Eliasons. We were all young. We had rooms out on terraces overlooking deep valleys. It was the kind of thing that we did in and around southern Italy at one time in an earlier trip. It was a rather typical tourist trip, nothing to be learned from it. Eliason had always been one of those alert people. He had studied journalism at

95 Columbia. His main interest was a journalistic one, and he had a very lively imagination. They were both such handsome people—they still are—but they’re handsome old people now. Their son is now living in Germany and he’s in charge of Caterpiller Tractor Manufacturing. He’s a fine man. He and our son Paul helped sail their boat to the races in Newport.

Blum: When you spoke about the Dushkin commission, you touched on the idea of political sympathies. At the time right before the United States entered the war, were political sympathies a factor in bringing a client and an architect together or not bringing a client and an architect together?

Schweikher: Not in my mind, nor as far as I know in our office. I’m of German extraction and have traveled a lot in Germany and have many many relatives there, my father's people and so on. And I was inclined to believe that Germany got a very raw deal in the early settlement of its borders. This didn't happen at that early stage. What happened was, shortly before the Second World War, I found myself sympathizing not with Hitler’s philosophy as described in Mien Kampf—I wasn’t ready to accept that—but with the idea of National Socialism as a way out for Germany and its application generally to a kind of bristling and “clear our boarders and see if we can all work together” kind of attitude, instead of the imposition in Silesia and the Maginot and stuff of that sort. I was ready to see Germany rise again, not necessarily to Bismarkian belligerence but to a kind of view that “Yes, look, the German is an intelligent person and he can help all of Europe.” This lasted for quite a while. I guess it must have been as I read excerpts from some of the things. I don't know where they came from because I didn't know Philip Johnson at that time, but apparently Philip Johnson was also quite a Germanic supporter for quite a while. At least he could talk to Mies a lot better than I could. I never ventured to speak German with Mies because he was too damn fast with it. I could speak a labored German and then have him reply to me in a gibberish that I couldn't understand at all, partly because, I suppose, he was not a south German. At any rate, my feelings were not for America to go tearing over there in any case. I felt that

96 this was essentially a European concern. This was ignorance on my part, I think, but I felt that it was in the first part of the war and I didn't think that Hitler was going to be a Hitler. I thought of him more as perhaps a good, sensible businessman turned modern-day Bismark. I wonder if this was part of Johnson's attitude. Johnson is better informed than I and has a quicker mind. I might have sympathized with him if we had ever been together, but we weren't at any time until much later. My dear partners, Lamb and Elting, took me aside and said, “We wish you’d stop talking this way. America ought to interfere. We've got to stop this business. America must go into the war.” Well, I disagreed and I didn't say any more. I also quarreled once when Rue Shaw had us to dinner. Al was always such a noisy guy anyway. I quarreled with Al. “Well let’s go outside and settle this.” We were happy. We were in one of those little smart places down around the Ambassador Hotel or something or other. It seemed funny to me at the time, but he was red in the face. Later on we sort of settled our differences by working together. I was always very busy at the Arts Club whenever an exhibit was coming because I hung so many of the exhibits. We had a rather elaborate exhibit once that required a lot of lighting changes and Al was pretty skillful. Al came and helped Rue and I set it up one night and so I guess we made up a little bit. Then at that time Elting joined the Navy when things were really rough, when they finally got very rough and it looked as though we had better get into it militarily. Joe Salerno, I guess was the first to leave the office to go into the service and then Wynn Elting suddenly came back one day to say that he’d been out to Great Lakes and he’d got himself a commission. A couple of people cancelled their projects because the war was coming. So I thought, “Well, why don’t I pack up and get into the Navy.” My brother had been drafted and he was on his way to Europe. He and I are a little cooler toward one another now for a variety of reasons, but back then we were quite close so that bothered me. So, I made Elting and Lamb very happy. Meanwhile, Lamb had been—I don't know how he got it—appointed civilian attaché to the American embassy in Spain to examine the Spanish so-called revolution, the dregs of that. He also had gone immediately to London to examine the effects of aerial

97 bombardment, which was a very dangerous assignment. But first Ted came and gave me a lecture that I'm not yet in the navy and so on. Then he got on a plane and the plane ground looped at Lisbon and he was drowned. I was, by this time, in the navy. That's about all there was to it. There wasn't much thinking on my part.

Blum: He was killed in 1942?

Schweikher: Yes, I think so.

Blum: And by that time you were already in the naval reserve?

Schweikher: I think I went into the navy about that time because I can remember everybody at Great Lakes that came in at my time. We were all late men, we weren’t the early guys, because they were already very boastful. They sat there at desks without going anywhere. I called myself, as many of us did, an “over-age destroyer” because I was already too old to be considered as one of these advancing young people that was going to step up in grade.

Blum: Were you in the naval reserve?

Schweikher: Yes, the U.S. Naval Reserve. I was in Illinois for the first year and a couple of months. I discovered something that I was eligible for. I wasn't really eligible for sea duty and I couldn't have gotten it if I tried. It would have been what I was most interested in because I probably knew most about it. I had studied my navigation and other things so I would have been prepared to go to sea. I would never have gotten into a fighting ship, I would have gotten supply ship duty or something of that sort. When the captain of the station, Capt. T. Dwight Carr, went to Australia, Elting went with him. It wasn't very long after that when I got orders to report to the service force, Seventh Fleet, for transport duty. Transport duty was the farthest thing from my mind. I saw myself as a Lt. Commander standing behind a bunch

98 of guns in defense of an oil tanker or something. Oh boy, who wanted that duty? Nobody wanted that duty, you'd have to be super-belligerent to want it.

Blum: What happened to your office during this time?

Schweikher: We closed it. We packed everything up, it was out in the country, and I left Dorothy there. She was the gal that really saw the war through, she really did. She lived like a war wife all right.

Blum: But you say for the early war years and even the years prior to the war, political sympathies really didn't affect any commissions in your office?

Schweikher: Not to my knowledge. In fact Lou Upton called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to design a new line for Sears Roebuck. He said, “I know you’re commissioned. I know you' re busy at Great Lakes, but we’d allow plenty of time for that.” I said, “Well, I'm having enough difficulty getting back and forth and so on from where I am that I'd just as soon not.” I was at that time beginning to be interested in military government and I thought I had a good chance of getting into that. Ultimately I was and I got my orders. About the same time I was ordered to report to Australia sea base I got my orders to report to the University of Virginia for logistics training with the army/navy pool in military government. This was to go at it east or west. We went from there to the University of Chicago for language training. Then they split us up. Some went to Germany or to Italy or wherever the base was. They sent us to California for further transfer to the various islands. It took a long time to do all this. It took over a year and a half to get all that training. By the time we got it Germany was ready to capitulate and we were getting ready to invade Japan. It was no longer a very attractive assignment. We studied Japanese furiously and we had a certain amount of conversational Japanese. I had just gotten orders to go to the service force, Seventh Fleet, disregarding my training, when I also got the notice that I was eligible for discharge. I had all my points. My dear friend

99 Lockhard—I had a good friend in the officers’ pool there—was shocked because he got orders to go for further transfer to Korea and be in on the surrender. Lockhard was shocked that I wanted to go home. Well, we had just had a new son.

Blum: You returned to Chicago?

Schweikher: Yes, to pick up the pieces, get the drafting room limbered up, and hire a person or two. Meanwhile I got a couple of letters. I got a letter from the gal that wanted to build a church in Plainfield, Iowa, and that kind of thing. By the time I got to Chicago I had two or three small commissions in and around the Chicago area, out where we were.

Blum: And your partnership was then Schweikher and Elting?

Schweikher: Elting had written to me that he was coming in and asked if I would meet him on Cripple Creek in Palmer Lake, on Walter Paepcke’s estate. He was going to be visiting the Paepckes. I knew Pussy, but I didn’t know Walter. She used to be an active member in the Arts Club.

Blum: Can we go back a few years to the late 1930s in Chicago? In 1937 Moholy- Nagy came to Chicago to take over the directorship of the new Bauhaus. Did you know him?

Schweikher: I knew him quite well, perhaps not as well as many people did. I didn't know the Bauhaus or the history of the Bauhaus well, but we came to know one another quite well. I can't recall exactly why. I was a visitor once or twice at his institution and for some reason, not clear to me now, we were guests of the Moholy-Nagys two or three times. We got to know Sibyl quite well, perhaps even better than Moholy. There were one or two times in which he’d ask me to come out to the institution on Prairie Avenue—I guess the school had been helped into existence by Walter Paepcke. I went and we had pleasant meetings with the students and with one another. There

100 were, once or twice, occasions on which he or Sibyl had invited us over to see his drawings and paintings and then we had gone for that purpose. Howie Myers, of Architectural Forum, concocted the idea of a Chicago round table of architecture for which the Forum apparently agreed to pay the price. I can’t remember who the Chicago representative was, I think it was probably John Root, who got us together for a luncheon on a succession of Fridays in the Tavern Club. Moholy-Nagy was to be one of the primary participants. I was present, and John Root, and I think Fred Keck, and, I'm not certain, maybe Bill Pereira, and Al Shaw, and one or two others. We began with the kind of presentation that I’m having here with you in which John Root or someone began by asking questions and off in some remote part of the room there was a listening radio, a recorder making notes of this, apparently to send to New York. I think that once or twice Howie Myers came from New York to sit in. He was a delightful person.

Blum: Were these round table talks published?

Schweikher: To my knowledge no, they were never published. Whoever was Root's successor might know something about it. I don't know whether our neighbor, Bernard Bradley in Sedona—he was formerly with Holabird and Root—would know anything about it or not. I doubt it because he was sort of late on the scene.

Blum: What were some of the topics you all discussed?

Schweikher: I haven't any recollection. We talked in a stilted way, even more stilted than my present presentation, we were hesitant. We’d be at our lowest intellectual level, and it could be low, until we’d had a few glasses of wine and then once or twice there might be a kind of eruption of semi- intelligence. I thought it, and I think my table colleagues thought that it was a complete flop. I'm afraid that it was. There have been splendid ones since. I think of the Eisenman group in New York that was able to produce intelligent discussion, but not our group. The only rather amusing thing—I

101 don't mean this to be personal, but it was just one of those things at the time—was that John Root always liked to put me between himself and Moholy because he didn't like the kind of laugh that Moholy had, which was pleasant and jolly enough but had a kind of hiss to it. Root would shudder every time Moholy laughed and Root would whisper to me that he couldn't stand it any longer and would leave. That was about what I got out of the round table. Root was usually quite amusing anyway, and I think he intended these little objections to be his form of humor for that presentation.

Blum: When did you meet John Root?

Schweikher: I suppose the first time that John and I met was in the company of Keck, Herrick Hammond, Bennett, and Pereira. A photograph was taken of that group and published later in a book by Tigerman.

Blum: Are you referring to a photo of an architectural jury at the Saddle and Cycle Club, June 10, 1939, that was published in the Chicago Architects catalog? Was this when you first met John Root?

Schweikher: I think I first met Root there. It's possible that I met him before that at one of these typically informal architectural luncheons either at the Cliff Dwellers or at the Tavern Club. Elting loved to go to those and I think that part of his pleasure in the practice of architecture was luncheons that brought us in touch with other architects. I guess it perhaps impressed me to the point where I did not like formal dinners with architects—least of all did I like to talk—but I always enjoyed small groups at luncheon time or sometimes for an impromptu supper party with a small group.

Blum: Were you a member of clubs?

Schweikher: The Arts Club was far and away my favorite because when you wanted to be quiet and alone you really could be. Mies and I used to meet at the Arts

102 Club. That was my other recollection. I couldn't speak German for beans and Mies was very limp on English in those early days but somehow or other we understood each other without a great amount of language. So, the Arts Club was my favorite, especially when I could have luncheon with Mies. It was a nice place for Dorothy and me to have luncheon. She could come up from the center of town and I was right out there in Streeterville. It was also frequently good to go down to the Cliff Dwellers. We’d been invited to take out a membership there, which we did. And the moment we took out a membership we seemed to have less and less reason for going there. Elting lost interest, and I lost interest even in the cherry pie, or whatever pie it was that I found everybody liked, and the roast beef and pie. I missed that. I had also, as I’ve noted somewhere else, probably seen a lot of it in my days with David Adler, when I was not a member. Before Robert Work, Alfred Granger once took me to luncheon at the Cliff Dwellers where I saw Louis Sullivan in the distance, silhouetted. That’s as close as I ever got to him. We weren’t introduced. We turned around and he said, “Meet I. K. Pond.” I guess that was I. K. Pond. These are the distinguished people of the time and there were many other distinguished architects of those days in that club. Granger was a popular member and he loved it. I never came to love the Cliff Dwellers Club. I didn’t like the Tavern Club at all.

Blum: Did you belong to the Tavern Club?

Schweikher: No, I never joined. Ted Lamb joined and Elting joined. I had a luncheon once and at the table I think it was with Ted Lamb, somebody else, and the fan dancer Sally Rand. Sally Rand was my partner at the table, but I think we never spoke a word. That, and looking out the Tavern Club window at Chicago, were my top experiences at the club. I didn't go back often, although I think Root and Holabird were frequent luncheon and cocktail goers. The Tavern Club was, to my mind, less a luncheon club than a cocktail club. They seemed to have the biggest collection and it wasn't of course all architects.

103 Blum: You said earlier that the club where you spent the most time was the Arts Club. You were on the board of directors from 1939 to 1956. In what way were you involved with the Arts Club?

Schweikher: I was a rather faithful committee member.

Blum: On which committee?

Schweikher: Membership and arts exhibition. Rue seemed to think that I did a good job hanging pictures. I remember that Sam Marx said, “The trouble with Schweikher is that he hangs too many pictures.” It seemed to me that my task was to hang what we got from a collection and if there were more than the space would allow, one simply tried to hang them in such a way that they all could be seen.

Blum: Do any exhibitions stand out in your mind as memorable, for one reason or another?

Schweikher: Perhaps the first one, maybe it was in a sense a recent one, was the Naum Gabo sculpture shown together with the Albers geometries.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Schweikher: The sculptures, the clocks, looked very well surrounded by Variations and Homage to the Square.

Blum: Who else was on the exhibition committee with you?

Schweikher: I was on the exhibition committee and in a way the exhibition committee always included Rue, but Bill Eisendrath and I made up the most constant part at the time that I was active there. Bill was the best in criticism and assisted me in keeping my bearings in that direction and so did Rue. The

104 job of hanging, for architectural reasons and perhaps mechanical ones rather than intelligence ones, came to me. I hung most of the shows. I loved the experience. It was one of my good times alone in the exhibition rooms with paintings and sculpture.

Blum: Did you select the works of the painters or sculptors that were to be exhibited?

Schweikher: We rarely selected. What selection we did was not always greeted with happiness.

Blum: By whom?

Schweikher: By the galleries. Betty Parsons in particular was quite unhappy when I had to decide to leave a Jackson Pollock rolled up in the storage room because it was too high and too wide to fit our new galleries. There simply wasn't room enough and when Betty came to see the show she wouldn’t listen to my apologies. We got to be good friends later during my New Haven residence. I saw a good bit of her, so did Dorothy, and we forgot all about that. But Betty took it quite hard at that time.

Blum: The Arts Club has a reputation for being an early promoter of modern design. Were you instrumental in that?

Schweikher: No, I don't think I was instrumental. I was a tool. I was used to realize the research and inspection of Rue Shaw. In my opinion Rue may have been supported by such old timers as Bobsy Goodspeed, Alice Roullier and Bill. Bill was sharp. I was not a sharp observer of painting. I either loved it all, disliked it, or didn't understand it at all. Rue had a clear, discerning eye, but of course so did Alice and Bobsy, and they had a good bit more experience than I. Bill Eisendrath was quite sharp and knowledgeable, good history background, even in the modern work. I was just sort of a “go-a- longer” in that respect. As Mies once said to me, “Paul you and I are the

105 ones that know how to hang the pictures.” He meant because it was an architectural task. I did not agree with him at first but the more compliments I got the more I came to believe that maybe he was right. I stopped paying attention to Sam Marx’s comment that I was crowding too many paintings in the space and so then I crowded when I pleased. The result was almost always popular. When I first began hanging I hung in a horizontal linear manner, constantly getting into trouble with opposites and color. I solved my own problem by deciding that paintings could be hung vertically, as well as horizontally and I made my own compositions that gave me considerable more freedom in the space. The end result was generally pleasing. That was my principle activity. Of course I also attended the meetings that had to do with new members, administration, and so on. I loved all of it. Representing the club to outside people or new members, I boasted of its professionalism. I felt that we were a professional museum with smart, interested, influential members and that there was a very real professional mission being accomplished by the Arts Club.

Blum: Who were some of the members that stand out in your mind?

Schweikher: Well immediately those that I've already mentioned, Alice Roullier, Rue Shaw, Bobsy Goodspeed, the Eisendraths, and Sam Marx.

Blum: How do you remember Rue Shaw?

Schweikher: As a person with a splendid eye for art, energetic in a quiet, never tiring way, stubborn, quite capable as an administrator, and with a complete understanding of the club and its mission. She, of course, was a clubwoman in other respects. She was a member of the Tuesday Club, they were an astute organization. She knew how to run a club.

Blum: Was her husband involved with the Arts Club as well?

Schweikher: I didn't think Al was involved much. He came, I remember, one time when

106 we had a problem in the new galleries that Mies had done. There was a lighting problem in which we needed to install more lighting and the problem came all of a sudden. We thought of a solution that would require more lights. So Al, Rue, Dorothy, and I met one night, had supper together, went to the gallery. Al showed his abilities best in being a damn good electrician and he put a lot of the fixtures together. Rue, Dorothy, and I put the fixtures in place and by the time the early morning hours arrived we were ready for the morning's exhibit. The only other time that I can remember was—I don't remember the show but it was about the time when we opened the new galleries—when some knowing person, who knew that Al was an architect and not a painter and so on, had come up to Al because of the hanging. They were impressed apparently by the hanging—I don't know that I had done it, I can't remember that. They said, “Oh, Shaw, did you do all this?” Al said, “No, I only painted the paintings.” That was his quick Irish wit and it probably expressed how active he was. I don't think he was active in the club, we rarely saw one another there anyway. Rue was always there to be found at work.

Blum: You mentioned earlier an exhibition that stands out in your mind, a joint exhibit of the work of Gabo and Albers. You’ve told an amusing story about that, would you repeat it?

Schweikher: Well I’m not very certain about the facts. I’ll try to tell quickly the odd thing that happened. I wasn't present when these things happened. We had one of two clocks of Gabo’s. It was a beauty, I knew it as a beauty. But when it arrived it wasn't a beauty. It arrived as a collection of small angled bits of colored glass at the bottom of a box. That was our first blow. We then set some of the string tension pieces on pedestals in the proper manner as far as pieces were concerned and as far as the pedestals were concerned. However, we had soft carpeting throughout the new gallery, very pleasant to walk on, but difficult to set vertical wood pedestals upon. At some point, I guess during the early morning hours, one of the janitors must have hit a pedestal and knocked the tension piece off and, of course, when it hit

107 the floor even with a soft carpet, it exploded in all directions. We were already on rather precarious footing with Gabo because when he arrived I had hung the Albers show—this was before I knew Albers—and I had hung the Albers in the most sympathetic manner I could. I didn't know the geometry very well but I found it fascinating. I hung the show without direct reference to the sculptures that I had not yet put up. I then put up the sculptures. Gabo was the first to arrive on the evening of the exhibition and he walked in the door. I was not there but Rue told me afterwards that she went to greet him and he looked around the room and his comment was “If I had known that this commercial artist was going to be here, I wouldn't have sent my things.” I think we kept that remark from Albers. I know I did all the rest of my life, even though I came to know Albers very well at Yale and elsewhere. I never mentioned Gabo’s remark. Albers respected Gabo and probably liked his work very well in return. I don't think that he had any of that strong bitter feeling, although maybe he did as a German. That's about the only major circumstance we had over there. There are lots of things I can tell about the Arts Club. Another very faithful, hard-working politician in the public eye and politician at the Arts Club was a gal known as Bertie Bauer. She was director of most of the meetings. She may have even been president in the earlier days before Rue became president. I may have picked that up without knowing what her official position was, but she could run a meeting and she did. She was more toast-masterish in running a meeting than Rue. Rue was soft-voiced and quiet and ran a meeting quietly. Bauer had a fine, loud voice, a brusque, direct manner and she ran a meeting like a political meeting would be run. She not infrequently preceded many Arts Club meetings, as I remember it, by distributing political buttons for the various candidates for office in the city of Chicago. I can't remember now whether they were Republican or Democratic. She was always very forceful about them.

Blum: Was she in charge when you first began to attend meetings?

Schweikher: Yes, I think so. I went to her house once. I was told to report to Bertie

108 Bauer. She lived in one of those houses on the very Near North Side, somewhere up the street a way. I can't remember whether it was Astor Street or what. I arrived in a spinning taxi on an icy day in Chicago. My head continued to spin in my meeting with her and I left that way with the impression of somebody very powerful, insistent, and very set in her ways. But she was a good friend and a devoted person to the club. Another person whose name doesn't come to me but who must have been one of the founders with Bobsy Goodspeed and others was Robert Allerton. Robert was very interested, and I think John Gregg Allerton was perhaps responsible for inviting me to membership, but I can't remember seeing him more than once at the club and that was during one of the receptions or recitals, something of that sort. John didn’t come very often. He had the difficulty of taking on more and more responsibility at Adler's office and probably taking on a great amount of responsibility in Monticello and running the farm. He was back and forth a good bit. Those are the people that I met most, but there were others. Frannie Stanton's wife, Louise, served on the membership committee and other committees. There was also, I think, Emily Owings. These are the people that come to mind now.

Blum: Off and on, with reference to the Arts Club, you've spoken about Mies. He came here in 1938 to head Armour Institute, now IIT. When did you first meet him?

Schweikher: There were two times when he came to my house. I think the first time was when he himself came with Lora Marx to call. I don’t know why they picked on me, I don’t know who told Mies about me. I had met him quite informally at some luncheon club, probably the Tavern Club, in one of those standup meetings when you come in and find friends sitting at a table. I was motioned over to meet the new arrival and it was probably John Holabird that introduced me. I knew of Mies only—and this took some thinking back on my part—as the man who had designed that miraculously beautiful building, the Barcelona Pavilion. It was Lee Atwood who had brought pictures of that to my attention. So, I knew I had met a great man

109 who had just arrived, I didn’t know any more than that.

Blum: Why did that pavilion impress you so?

Schweikher: Mostly because Lee Atwood pounded it into my head as to what I should see when I was looking at it.

Blum: What was that?

Schweikher: That was a spatial house that was made spatial by the use of glass, which separated the space, but not the view. Plus, it was unified by one great flat slab of roof. Then, of course, there was the choice of sculpture, the location of quiet water, and, as Mies would have said, “Everywhere God is in the details.” It was a magnificent building that, if any part of it exists, should be restored today.

Blum: And there you had the opportunity, at the Tavern Club, to meet the creator.

Schweikher: Then came the time when the Arts Club had to get out of the Wrigley Building. Bobsy Goodspeed, working with an architect whose name should come to me. He was one of Chicago's best. Arthur Heun—that’s it—he did a beautiful job at the Wrigley Building location. In many ways it was a handsomer place than the later space, but the interiors lent themselves to that and Goodspeed was a great color gal, she knew color. That was quite a place. When we had to get out of that space, Rue called on Mies to design an interior for the new building. He did a careful geometry of wood panels. It was good exhibition space.

Blum: What happened on the day Mies and Lora Marx appeared at your door?

Schweikher: Mies sat, and I don't think we said much, and I'm not sure how much I said. I don't think they stayed long.

110 Blum: Why did they come?

Schweikher: To see my house in Roselle.

Blum: Did you invite them?

Schweikher: No, but I'll admit that I'm not clear about what I've just told you. I'm quite sure, however, that Mies came a second time. When George Howe called me from Chicago I think I had already received him—this would be rather late in my acquaintance with Mies and I must have seen him a good bit, yes I had seen Mies before this at the Arts Club. By this time we were moderately acquainted and I think I also knew that through Rusty Beatty, Mies was doing some work for one of his real estate firms. He had already built or was building the Streeterville projects, the apartment buildings. I think at that time also Howe had already invited me to succeed him at Yale. Then the telephone rang, we were in Roselle at the time, and Howe wanted to know if he could bring Mies out. The answer was an enthusiastic yes, and out they came. They said they were on their way to see Bruce Goff's Pumpkin house [the Ruth and Sam Ford house in Aurora, Illinois] and they thought that maybe I would help direct them. They'd come a rather roundabout way to get to the Ford house but I was delighted to have the invitation. Dorothy and I got in the station wagon, put Mies and George in and off we went. Before this, however, we'd all emptied a rather large pitcher of martinis, which Mies loved, and so did George and I. So, off we went. I nearly ran down one of the Aurora and Elgin trains in the process. By the time we got near the Ford house, none of us had any appetite for knocking on the door and we hadn't telephoned them. Mies took one look at it and said he didn't want to see any more. I think he must have gone back in later years and I don't believe he felt any animosity toward the architect or the building. So then we went on toward the Fox River, towards Edith Farnsworth's house, which was occupied by Edith, whom we knew quite well. As we approached, there's some little town nearby and there was a little place where you could find a coffee. So we went to a little

111 restaurant that served coffee. Mies said, “I must stay here. I can’t go with you because Edith and I are having difficulties.” We left Mies at the place where he sat down to have a cup of coffee and Dorothy and I took George and went on to call on Edith, who was home. She showed us through her whole house. I was disappointed, I remember walking in and finding some store chairs instead of the Barcelona chairs, which I had hoped to see. I hadn’t realized that they had become a part of the altercation and were omitted deliberately, I guess, by Edith. We spent some time talking not about Mies but admiring the house and telling Edith what a beautiful place it was and in other ways probably annoying her and boring her. We all began to feel a little annoyed and bored with one another and then we left. George Howe, I think, knew very little of that ruckus. He came back with us and we joined Mies. We all had another cup of coffee and we spent most of our time talking about Frank Lloyd Wright and George's recent trip. George liked Wright, Wright liked George, and they always had amusing arguments with one another. George was very quick with humorous good wit or good- humored wit and he had lots to say. He said, “I had called Wright to ask if I could come and I asked if I could bring Philip Johnson. Wright said, ‘By no means. You cannot bring Philip Johnson.’” Mies laughed at that. George said, “Well, we talked about Johnson a good bit nevertheless and about other architects.” I had had too many drinks or something and I said, “Including me?” George said, “Yes, including you. You weren’t important.” That was the truth. He wouldn’t have said that if he hadn't been drunk, he was too polite for that. Mies leaned back in his chair and just roared. He thought that was the funniest thing. That was the funniest kind of answer to give to me. Mies just laughed so hard and George brought him suddenly back out of his leaning chair by saying, “And he didn't think much of you.” “Ah,” said Mies. “No. He sees I go in a different direction.” That was the end of that talk and back we went to Roselle.

Blum: What was Mies’s opinion of Frank Lloyd Wright?

Schweikher: I don't think I ever heard Mies voice his opinion of Frank Lloyd Wright. Did

112 he have an opinion that he expressed? I don't know.

Blum: How do you think he felt about Frank Lloyd Wright's work?

Schweikher: I never asked him about Wright or his regard or disregard of Wright, except about a particular building—I've forgotten now which one it was. This was at one of those Arts Club tête-à-têtes that Mies and I had, not very frequently, but once in a great while when I was going to be in town and he was free, we’d stop in at the Arts Club for a martini and a quick luncheon together. We’d try to talk in his half English/half German way. I remember asking him what he thought about a particular Wright building. What could Wright have been doing at that time? Maybe it was that California civic center. I can't remember what it was exactly and I can't recall why I asked Mies. I was probably bent on getting some reply because I had wondered why Mies didn't say more about Wright. Mies gave a quick answer that I thought was light and easy but then had more meaning to me afterwards when he said it about somebody else. He said it with all his imperfection of speech in English, “You can do dat.” That was frequently his answer. I think he also gave me that on Bruce Goff’s Ford house, ultimately. “Well what do you think of that house?” I said. I think I did ask him that as we left, I believe I asked. “Ya, you can do dat,” he said. The idea is “So, each man for himself. Go ahead, do it.” He probably didn't go out of his way very far, unlike Johnson, who would want to be critical and known as a critic and who would change his opinion after he’d told it to you, as you know probably. You'd find that if you told somebody in front of Johnson, “Well now, Philip believes that thus-and-such is so,” Philip would say, “Not at all, not at all. If I've said that, I've changed my mind.” You were never going to trap him in any way and I think he’s that way today. Mies's answer was of a similar kind, “You're not going to trap me with any of that stuff. You can do dat.” I said, “Well, do you like it, do you dislike it?” Most of us wouldn’t pursue it, I guess. If you got that from Mies, or even Philip Johnson, you might take it as a kind of warning, “Lay off. I don't want to tell you, if anyone!” so that you wouldn't pursue it.

113 Blum: Over the years you must have become rather good friends with Mies professionally as well as personally.

Schweikher: We did because, of course, Mies asked me to replace Shaw at the [Farnsworth] trial. That was one friendly gesture. Mies came again to my house. Mies was my guest two or three times at Yale. The students were, of course, delighted because it was during the construction of the Seagram building and I guess Mies had the model at the time. The first time he came to Yale he brought the model of the Seagram building, which was quite large and very carefully done in his office all in bronze, copper and glass. They gave Mies an honorary degree at Duquesne. I thought they might have waited a little bit because all the architects were looking at my building and they kept saying, “You certainly gave Mies a run for his money there. You’ve got quite a building.” I never got any expression about it directly from Mies. Who was Mies's successor for a long while? He was Mies's superintendent and later finished up some of Mies’s commissions in Chicago after Mies died. I've forgotten his name now. Anyway, he said, “Well I'll reserve my opinion of your building.” I never asked him his opinion

Blum: Are you speaking of your Student Union building at Duquesne University?

Schweikher: Yes. They honored Mies with an honorary degree, I don't know why. Dorothy referred to this not long ago. A year or two ago, Father McNamara called on us. I had sort of blown my top at one point, I was just laughing about it, I guess. I said to him, “Your school gave Mies an honorary degree for the science building,” and I let it go at that, I didn't say anymore. We didn't see this guy—he was very likable, he was quite active on my building because he was in charge of a great many of the youth activities for the school. Then suddenly, I get a letter from McAnulty explaining that, Oh yes, they did like my building, they were very fond of my building, etc., etc., etc. This was because I had written to Father McNamara saying, “Well, my wife has said that it's the only building in Kidder Smith's book on Pittsburgh of

114 that year.” He immediately, apparently, sent Dorothy’s letter to McAnulty. McAnulty then wrote me, not an apologetic letter but a reassuring letter, that, “Oh, they did indeed. In fact it is one of the finest on our campus and we are most grateful to you.” And then he explained—it was not clear to me but was something that had to do with Catholicism or something or other—the reason why Mies was given the honorary degree. I, of course, then wrote to thank McAnulty and to say that I remembered something that Adler had said to me once: “It is reassuring to have your opinion of my building. I thought you didn't like it.”

Blum: You said Mies was a guest lecturer when you were at Yale. Was he a guest lecturer when you were at Carnegie Mellon?

Schweikher: Yes, probably an equal number of times. In fact he probably liked coming to Tech, as we called it, better than he liked going to Yale. Yale was farther away and the coffee shops and martinis weren't so available as at Carnegie Mellon. He was there, I guess, two or three times. On the first visit we had simply taken him up to the Tin Angel Cafe up on the Mount Washington bluffs, overlooking the Allegheny River. We asked Mies, when he came the second time, “Now where would you like to go to dinner?” “Oh,” said Mies immediately, “I want to go to the Tin Can.” Everybody got a big roar out of that. He could only remember it as the Tin Can, he knew no implications of anything else.

Blum: What stands out in your mind about Mies the man?

Schweikher: I would say that I didn't know him.

Blum: And yet you were a good friend of his.

Schweikher: It's obvious now, isn't it, that I knew him at the tail end of his life. I didn't know that at that time. Mies was afflicted I guess, by arthritis and I don’t know what else. He used a cane and he had difficulty walking. It had begun

115 as early as his visits to Yale. During one visit I probably saved his life inadvertently. I was walking ahead of him in one of those narrow little New England places where our students lived like rats—they lived handsomely in a way because one student would follow another year to year and many times the professional students, especially, lived in these little hovels up three or four flights of stairs. This was one of those tight, narrow, carpeted flights of stairs to one of the student’s apartments and we'd just finished a jam session with them and were on our way out when…

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Schweikher: I saw this bulky shadow and felt and heard the rumble and bumble of a body almost in full flight. Then Mies hit me with quite a wallop. I had just had time to turn my back and brace myself against the stairs and the banisters and I held him in check while the students grabbed him. He had simply missed a step and didn't have any reflexes that would hold him. He was a very heavy-set man. I’m sure his cigar smoking didn’t help him any other than that he loved it so. That was one of the things that I had asked him at one of these luncheons. I’d said, “Mies, tell me some of your likes. What do you like the best?” He said “Oh, that is easy: my Schwitters, my cigars and my martinis.” Well, that was certainly a good spiritual appetite but not necessarily one that was best for his health. I had long ago given up cigars, but we enjoyed his Schwitters and one or two visits to his apartment and we always enjoyed sharing martinis.

Blum: When you were asked to be an expert witness at the Farnsworth trial, what was your testimony all about?

Schweikher: It seemed to hang, according to later casual conversation with the master in chancellery, on a point I made. I asked him about it. He said, “You were effective.” I said, “In what way?” He said, “Well, you had what appeared to be a harmless conversation with the opposing council.” I said, “What was that?” He said, “It was all over the bathroom. I thought you were going

116 to be thoroughly browbeaten on that because it was then that they asked you if Mies had designed the fixtures and you said no.” They had asked me, “Well, was Mies responsible for the bathrooms? Did these come under his jurisdiction?” I had said, “Yes.” “But didn't he design the fixtures?” “No.” “Well, then where was his influence? Where was his importance in the design of those?” “Oh,” I said, “he placed them.” All I can say is that there were no further questions. The council simply stopped asking me. It was when we met to discuss the disposition of the trial that the master said, “Your answer was superb.” It was a desperate answer and I gave it not knowing whether I was saying anything important or not. But I felt, nevertheless, that it came out as a rather strong feeling. It reflected on the whole profession of architecture. Yes, that may be true, maybe the architect isn’t responsible for these places, and to some degree that's undoubtedly true in a certain respect. Sometimes the architect never sees this array of urinals and toilets and so on and he just makes a space for them. But, in the case of a small house for a woman who's going to live there all by herself and so on, I'm sure that Mies would take great care. He would have taken care, if not for the cosmetics of the room as it were, certainly for the safety of fixtures and so on, so that this would have been always in his mind. I thought I could defend that if it were argued further, but the opposing council thought it was a point and they admitted it. The idea was that if that were true of the bathroom, which was in many ways—but it wasn't brought out—aesthetically the least important room in the house, then it must be true for the whole house. One thing that I should add to the story is that Mies had told me on this afternoon when the rest of us visited Edith was, “The only thing that bothers me is that I can remember with what enthusiasm I received the marble and how I spent two or three days laying out the floor out on the ground.” He was furious that she didn't realize that that was a particular devotion of his. He was certainly a master and a master in his own mind and he felt it perhaps a little demeaning that he should be expected to go out there and lay these slabs down. She should have hired somebody, or he should have hired somebody himself, to lay those slabs down for him.

117 Blum: Why do you think you were selected as one of two expert witnesses for that trial?

Schweikher: Friendship.

Blum: What was the basis for Mies's suit against Edith Farnsworth?

Schweikher: If I understood him, it was because she had refused to pay him his fee.

Blum: So the trial was to prove that he had earned his money?

Schweikher: Yes. The whole thing was a little different, something not to be explained by me, because Mies apparently had made an arrangement with Edith. They had made a German business arrangement in which Mies acted as the architect, the creator of the project, and the contractor who bought and paid for the labor. So he went right ahead with the whole thing and incurred the debts in his own name. When it came to recovering some of this as a part of his fee, which it was to be, Edith was apparently appalled at the costs. Now I don't know whether Mies made these or whether he got these from estimating contractors or not, but I think some of the early estimates were as low as $17,000 and at some point they passed $34,000. This all sounds like peanuts today but in those days that sudden jump of 100%—I may have all those values wrong, but it was in that general area—made the agreement go haywire. These days were still black when I was first called in. Mies was very discouraged that he was never going to get his money and he was beginning to be quite angry about it. He still was until, I guess, the second day of my appearance—the first day had been only an interview on the part of the master. The next day, just before the trial, Mies said to me, “Paul, I've found my notation with Edith.” The notation was that he had said something to the effect that the estimate was only an estimate and indicated that it might amount to more. He had found it in one of his German philosopher’s books, Nietzsche or someone. Mies

118 said, “I found it in one of my favorite books. I had used it as a mark.” That was even more important. Now who really knows that story and who really knows the accuracy of it, whether he ultimately told it to one of those people who's now there… There was a young man by the name of Ian Lee in his office who was running the office when Mies died, I think. Then there was a man who took over temporarily and who I was talking to during the days when we were building our two buildings together, he was Gene Summers. After that Ian Lee (I think that’s his name), a small man, sort of took over, I think, from Gene. Gene went on to do a late commission, —I don't know whether they ever built it, it was this great municipal building [McCormick Place] in Chicago, a huge thing. In connection with the trial, I was under considerable tension, I think, by the time I arrived for the trial itself. We were driving a little MG. Dorothy was with me and about midway between Roselle and the river—the town's name doesn’t come to my mind at the moment—the car simply stopped. I couldn't think of what could possibly stop a little MG other than itself, because it was so simply built. After standing quite a while, nervously and stupidly, I thought to lift up the hood. I just lifted it up in the old fashioned way of the folding sides. I could see nothing wrong until my eye caught the old fashioned electric cords leading to the spark plugs. One of them simply was dangling from the plug. The whole thing had come out of the socket. Well, I didn’t know whether it would go back or not but I lifted it up and put it down and screwed it with my fingers and then got the wrench and tightened it up. I got in and the car started at once and we went on. I went through seven hours of torture at the trial, not being at all sure what the validity of any reply would be and bored with the whole procedure to begin with. I was somewhat frightened all the way, although the master was most kindly, looking at me in a reassuring way and nodding his head when he thought I was on the right track. Then when I finished, without knowing a verdict the master said, “You made a good point on the bathroom,” where I felt that I had been the clumsiest. I came out of the court room only to be greeted by a tough looking, curly headed, enthusiastic person, beaming all over, grabbing my hand and telling me, “That was splendid!” I later found out that he was

119 Myron Goldsmith.

Blum: How did the verdict go?

Schweikher: The verdict was for Mies. All the way. And Mies and I, of course as you may guess, had the appropriate martinis to celebrate. It was shortly after that, I guess that I went to New Haven.

Blum: In 1953?

Schweikher: I think so.

Blum: In 1937, you took a trip to Japan. Did you make a study of domestic architecture there?

Schweikher: I made an observation. Study is too strong a word. I didn't know enough to study. Yes, we looked at it but not just at domestic architecture. There was all of Japan to see then. It’s too long a story really to begin on, a very involved one, full of impressions. This was Dorothy and I, together, doing this trip. We had taken one of the President lines, the Hoover. It was rather a big but awkward ship, well equipped for its day, a four stacker I think. Nothing eventful happened on the way over. We spent our time in Japan without trouble, although trouble was brewing. The Japanese already had armed forces at the gates of Peking. In and around Tien Tsin, they had commandeered travel almost in all directions. There was a Mrs. Calhoun and I guess at that time Mrs. Calhoun's husband had just died or perhaps was waiting for her in Peking. On board the ship she invited us to have whatever it was you had in those days in Peking in the marble boat, this would have been in the Emperor's Gardens. I’m trying to think of the architect that was in her party. Apparently we met briefly at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and they had had difficulties. There was a little too much sassing of the port officials. Bill Durham—or Dunham? I can't think of this young architect's name, he was probably about my age at that time—had

120 been thoroughly slapped. They were dejected and eager to get on to Tien Tsin and Peking and were having considerable difficulty in getting passage. Dorothy and I simply spent our night or two at the Imperial, admiring all the beauties of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work because it was intact at that time and fully restored from the earlier earthquake. It was a beautiful building. We heard rumors that it was inadequate and of course under the new regime might be replaced or remodeled. I guess we went from there to Nikko, but at any rate Calhoun and her party had gone on. Shortly after that we made our way slowly on to popular spots rather than historical ones, other than a visit Ueno Park and such places in Tokyo which had magnificent museums. We then moved on a rather short railway. The Tokaido was in existence but had none of the direct track and speed that it has now. We found our way ultimately to Kyoto and spent a little time traipsing up and down the pottery alleys for an odd cup or two, things that we thought we could carry. I hadn't really looked at the books much and didn't know about Ise although we had in mind a place that Allerton had been to and he and John said we must go to, and we had an invitation from them. This was Koyasan. Koyasan was very exciting because it took a steam train, an electric tram, a bus, and a little rickshaw and just a little two-wheeled cart to get us there. When we came into it, it was a monastery.

Blum: How do you feel Japanese architecture influenced your subsequent work?

Schweikher: Probably in too many ways to list but certainly, first of all, in the relationship of the house or home to the out of doors and to the land. It has a casual, easy refinement of indoor living with very little loss of the advantages of sunlight, winds, breezes, growing things. In fact it has a kind of continuation of the gentler part of outdoors into a semi-enclosed interior that could easily become, with little effort, quite like the out-of-doors. That is done through the use of the sliding screens, shoji, the matted floors, the large expanses of light through the use of rice paper, the lightness of construction, the refinement of detail and the close relationship of that detail to the use of the house. Doors were operative without a major

121 operation of tools or a search for tools. Mats were adaptable to walking on with little or no shoe structure. You could sleep on them and you could make chairs of them. There was a gentle transition of interior life to the out- of-doors in the stone and gravel walks. Wood was in its natural grains, colors, and textures, and closely related to growing trees. This could be extended into an almost indefinite string of related details.

Blum: The first large project you worked on when you returned from Japan seems to be your own home and studio in Roselle. Were some of the features that you’ve just described in Japanese architecture those that you used in your own home?

Schweikher: Yes. It wasn't a sudden or quick adaptation as perhaps it should have been. Perhaps because I was only aware of how it looked, rather than how it worked. I'm talking now about such things as the shoji that gave the Japanese house the most flexibility in relating the indoors to the out-of- doors. I was also a little fearful, as a Westerner, about the durability of the material—paper and wood, as opposed glass and steel—so I was timid. I think I always have been. I would like the opportunity to express myself as the Japanese could, given another chance. It's also expensive here to do the things that they do so easily. We lack the skills, we have skilled men but their skills go in a different direction. The American carpenter and his tools are quite different; they may not appear much different but they're quite different. In fact, I think the Japanese carpenter at work appears to the Western eye to be doing everything backwards, where a closer look and a closer examination indicate that he's doing them exactly as they should be done. The saw is pulled instead of pushed, the hammer is used almost like a musical instrument, the nail is fitted to do just the task of penetration not necessarily that of clamping and sealing and so on.

Blum: You seem to be very much aware of the Japanese process of putting materials together.

122 Schweikher: I think it is the most impressive. I'm talking only of perhaps the most related kind of structure of Japanese to Western: the use of wood, great bundles of wood shingles on a roof of one to two feet in thickness, the large overhangs that create shades and shadows, and the attention, of course, to the nature of the typhoon, the storm, or to fire. The buildings blow down, they burn, the Japanese seek refuge in the trees and on the ground and come back and rebuild in familiar patterns, with nowhere near the catastrophic reactions that occur here.

Blum: You mentioned that when you were in Japan you admired Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel. Were you aware of Japanese architectural influences, as well as those of Frank Lloyd Wright, when you designed your Roselle home and studio?

Schweikher: Yes, I suppose. I think the thing that must have impressed me with Wright was the beauty of his overhanging, sloping roof which were in many cases quite like the pavilions at the summer palace in Katsura.

Blum: Were there other features of Frank Lloyd Wright's work that appealed to you when you designed your Roselle home?

Schweikher: The extension of one space into another, done partly by folding screens or the lack of screens, and lower walls, that is walls that didn't necessarily go from floor to ceiling but allowed the passing viewer to look through, if not go through. Wright speaks of spatial differences and I think the Japanese house, palace, or larger scale rooms and spaces give a sense of… I'm trying to avoid the use of the word 'inner-penetration’ which was so much used, but there is no doubt that space in the small and large structure in Japan does seem to flow, rather than being continually stopped and subdivided. There's a certain sense inside of the flow of space into itself and also in and out of doors.

Blum: Was that one of your goals as you designed your own home?

123 Schweikher: Most of the time, yes. It seemed to be a virtue to pursue.

Blum: The fireplace wall in your home in Roselle is quite impressive.

Schweikher: Well, it’s the use of brick as a mass, I guess. It creates a contrast and I think one reacts to that. It’s the sense of weight, the sense of strength, and the relatedness of brick as an enclosure for controlled fire and as a protection as well.

Blum: There is a fireplace in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, I believe, that dates after your house was finished and it is very similar. Is there any connection between the fireplace in your home in Roselle and the fireplace in the Lloyd Lewis house in Libertyville by Frank Lloyd Wright?

Schweikher: I think there's no connection whatsoever. They were separated in time as well as in space. I heard from my carpenter that we had a visit from a number of people, both designers and draftsmen, who said they came from Taliesin, and that was pleasant to know. Well, let me modify that answer a little. Any skilled eye would see a strong difference. I think that perhaps your question is driving at what seemed to be a similarity. This again comes into this matter of who is copying whom.

Blum: Perhaps we should say who’s inspiring whom?

Schweikher: Well, I don't hesitate to say who’s inspiring whom. I think there is no doubt but what anyone looking at Wright's work should be inspired by is what Wright does. The reverse can be true. If what I do in any way has inspired anyone, including a group of Wright designers, I’m delighted. It's an accomplishment, really, to build hundreds of houses and have them all different. The tendency, probably, is more naturally toward building a hundred houses and having them all alike. There is too much stress put on whether or not one person copies another in my mind.

124 Blum: Why is the fireplace such an important feature in homes you build?

Schweikher: I guess I've always been a countryman at heart. I like a naked fire. I like the feel of it, the sound of it, the smell of it, particularly if we choose well in what we burn as we might choose to burn it. It’s a sense, I guess, that belongs partly to the indoors but also belongs to the outdoors. It has a country quality about it, an ’at home’ quality.

Blum: What do you think is the most successful feature of your home and studio in Roselle? What were you most pleased with?

Schweikher: I hadn't given that much thought. There was a combination of things that happened for a number of years in and around the house in Roselle. There was the smell of damp or wet wood, redwood in that case, after a rain. There was the feeling of enclosure in the arrangement of the wings of the house. There was a comfort in the low eaves, feeling that the house belonged to the person in the sense of its scale-relatedness. There was the softness of touch, the warmth of the wood. In fact, again, I think that had I thought that we could leave the house and come back without it having suffered some dire consequence of a storm while we were away, that would have led me to use paper and even to search for transparent papers instead of the glass, which was to me a subtraction from the quality of the house rather than an addition to it. I felt that for a long time about transparent glasses, that they represent a void rather than a division of space. It’s difficult to reply to that without sitting in front of or being in the house itself.

Blum: Were there untried features that you used in your house that worked?

Schweikher: Yes. I tried a number of things that did not belong to any Japanese derivation or relate at all, as far as I knew, to any direction that Wright or anyone else went in one-story buildings. I tried a number of experiments.

125 For example, a typical one that didn’t work very well was to try to heat a room with wood radiators. This was simply the process of imbedding heating pipes in sand-filled partitions. It could be done but it was laborious, there was a time lag that was annoying and a great amount of heat produced at the firing point without being satisfactorily effective in the warmth of the space that was enclosed, and so it went. Most everything else had been proven in one way or another. There was brick paving, of course, wood floors, wood walls and ceilings, the use of wood throughout, the delight in being able to shape and form enclosing spaces or useful benches, floors, walls, and roofs with one’s hands, without machine fabrication and importation. It was that kind of thing. Wood houses and perhaps paper and wood houses are available to everyone, really. It takes practice to do them but the practice is something that can be learned with ease, I think.

Blum: What contractor did you use for your house?

Schweikher: A tall, lanky German by the name of Emil Spohrleder. Emil had never done anything of this kind. We didn't have many inventions or novelties in the house. It was quite American in most ways. There were few, if any, Japanese innovations or introductions so that if there was a Japanese flavor it came primarily through the planning of the house and the type of material used, rather than the detail. The detail was almost all typical farmhouse, the kind of thing that Emil had been doing most of his life. I don't remember how old he might have been, perhaps in his forties. He was an experienced barn builder. I only mentioned the Japanese in that you have mentioned it and people have often referred to it as having a Japanese influence. The truth is that at the time we had been working on converting a very large Illinois barn next door that housed horses and cows and we were making a large and effective house out of it. We'd been working with wood planks and dowels and iron nails, cut nails, everything that was quite American rural.

126 Blum: Was the contractor you used a very popular one with Chicago architects at the time?

Schweikher: I don't think architects knew anything about Emil. We had him almost entirely to ourselves for our own house and for a number of other houses in and around the area that we built over the next few years. By the time I had gone East and then returned Emil had disappeared from the scene.

[Tape 6: Side 1]

Blum: In 1940 you also built the Rinaldo house. Mrs. Rinaldo told me that the reason she and her husband selected you as their architect is that they searched through the architectural journals and liked your work best. When you were commissioned, did they come to you with ideas they expected you to follow?

Schweikher: I don't remember how we worked together. Gertrude, I'm sure, knew exactly what she wanted in the way of space and location and probably expressed that quite clearly. Philip probably let her be the spokesman although he did watch and care for any and all particulars that had to do with staying within bounds, and other legal and related matters. Both shared an interest in the design as it progressed. Both made comments, criticisms and suggestions and it was a pleasant relationship all the way through. We, as the architect, nearly upset the whole thing by failing to double check the limits of the house on the property and we stepped over the property line on one side. Fortunately, Philip was able to arrange with the neighboring owner to purchase the necessary margin to make up for the invasion.

Blum: You designed a lot of built-in-furniture for that house. Was that what the Rinaldos asked you to do, or was this your idea?

Schweikher: Most of it was asked for by the Rinaldos. They liked the idea, for example, of screens between a kind of library end to the living room. This library end

127 was also to house a record player, and they asked me to design the record player so that it would become a part of the room. They asked me to design sliding screens in the Japanese fashion. They asked me then to do their beds and other details, most of which had to do with storage, and throughout the bedroom section. I also did lighting fixtures. They were pleased to have ceiling fixtures. They liked the idea of ceiling fixtures in some locations, like in the stair hall and other passages, and so we designed those. It was, I'm sure, a habit with many architects. It was a new experience for us. The house was a complete design rather than just making a structure of rooms.

Blum: You said that you felt that this is one of your most successful houses. Why is that?

Schweikher: I think even as I look at the plans from time to time now the space was compact but seemed to have sufficient room in which to sleep, entertain, it had easy maintenance and so on. Certainly the use of wood was direct, applicable, practical, logical, and quite handsome inside and outdoors. I'm sure the Rinaldos have liked it through the years, they've told me so.

Blum: In 1939, which was the time of the Rinaldo house, and soon after your house, your office was cited in journals as “doing significant modern work.” Who else would you say was doing significant modern work at the time? Who were some of your competitors?

Schweikher: I think the fact is that I was too preoccupied with my own work to be able to identify other people doing significant work.

Blum: In 1939 there was a Rockford housing project for the Federal Housing Authority. What was the project?

Schweikher: It was a government project for the construction of small housing, primarily I believe for the trades, people who were manufacturing products. The one in Rockford was for toolmakers, I think. I believe it came as a result of Fred

128 Keck's association with local federal housing people and our office was recommended. To my mind there was too much federal interference with the procedural details to give us the kind of freedom that would have been necessary to discover new ways of doing things economically. I never saw the end result.

Blum: Was what you designed ever built?

Schweikher: I think it was built in or near Rockford. I believe that Keck did whatever supervision was necessary. There was some kind of administration building that was part of the project, a central meeting house or dining area or something of the sort. This was so close to the war and I was soon to be in the Navy that I did not follow the fortunes of the project.

Blum: In that you were working with George Fred Keck on this project, did you try to use any of the earlier solar studies that you and he had worked on?

Schweikher: No. We did no housing together or separately as far as I know. Keck may have done some things, if you wish to call these semi-highrise apartments that he did on the South Side of Chicago, I can't recall anything else. Nothing at all equaled the row housing type of thing that was in the project published in the Record in March of 1933. When I came out of the Navy there was very little talk about housing projects of that kind. In Chicago, as in New York and some of the crowded big cities, some of that work was being talked about and I guess done. I was not asked to join in any of it, I had other things to do.

Blum: Well federal money did become available for housing on a large scale indicating a national need and concern.

Schweikher: Yes, but it was not a concern of mine. I wasn't too interested in it. I thought it had social directions and economical ones but that was not my primary interest. I was interested in solving the individual house problem.

129 Blum: Did any of your projects get scrapped or have difficulty getting financed because they were too contemporary?

Schweikher: I think that may have happened once or twice. It was nothing that I recall that we were stuck with. The project either was financed in some way and went ahead or was totally abandoned without fuss or trouble. I don't remember any project that got stuck somewhere in between the design of the project and the beginning of construction over finances. I’m sure that money problems came up. This is not true of later work, the institutional work, where budgets were made and increased and where we were having difficulty financing. Mostly the university buildings had budgets that were supposed to stretch through more than one project and ours was perhaps one of many rather than the only project being considered.

Blum: I had in mind early, residential work, say throughout the 1930s, when a modern style was not popular with lending institutions.

Schweikher: That might have happened to many architects who were doing groups of houses. The only group that we ever did was one for a group of professors at Northwestern University. They took care of the finances themselves and by the time they were ready to commission me they were ready to find the money. I was never asked to find any for them or to change the design in any way. So, I think I encountered very little of that. On the other hand, one might say, “Well, that's the reason your practice was so small.”

Blum: Were you aware of the fact that lending institutions were leery of lending money to build modern designs?

Schweikher: Yes, I remember it now as you remind me of it. It was something that never weighed on me much. I found it irritating, to the point of anger at times, at what I considered just plain stupidity. That was another way, I guess, of my not being affected by it because I avoided projects that had that

130 element in them. I didn't like to talk to people like that and most of the time I talked to people who may have needed the money but who were willing to do the finance fighting themselves. We kept pretty free of that and so in that sense the office was a happy one. I can't remember now ever having a project stop for lack of funds, or making extensive revisions, or cutting it in half, I can't remember that. I don't think it happened to us. I did examples of such things from time to time in the Chicago area. Later we did experience that sort of thing, as I say, with committees and groups; there was always the difficulty of building a building with a committee.

Blum: Was that because your design was too modern or because it was over budget?

Schweikher: No, it was not really due to design. I don't remember design ever becoming an issue in our projects, maybe that would only say to me that at that point maybe we were too conservative.

Blum: You mentioned a group of Northwestern University professors for whom you constructed homes, was this the Glenview Cooperative Community?

Schweikher: I can't remember the title but it sounds right.

Blum: This was in Glenview, it was also called Redwood Village, a group of six or seven houses.

Schweikher: If they used those terms I wasn’t aware of them. These were Northwestern University professors, that much I understood. They acted responsibly. Yes, it's that group. They were receptive. I cannot remember any battles with them over design. They seemed to have made up their minds that they should march uniformly to the degree that details that I recommended would generally be approved. We must have had some early discussions; I've forgotten those now too, in which certain procedures would be approved. I note in looking at old photographs that there are similarities to

131 the single house that Fyfe introduced into the office, in which we used the detail of fixed glass with louvers underneath for ventilation. That was an accepted detail. We didn't insist upon it, but many people liked it and used it in this group. It was that kind of thing. We had two or three alternates and we were pleased to use them. Although they chose, I believe, similar heating systems, refrigerators and so on where buying in quantity would reduce cost.

Blum: Planning and working out the details and the actual construction took several years, from 1938 to 1941. In an article in Architectural Forum in January 1946, one of the owners said that the group knew that getting the right architect would be the key to success. The article said “The man they wanted had to have advanced design ideas, anticipate the future in selecting materials, and understand the feeling of living close to nature. Moreover he had to mold the individual requirements of seven families into a unified plan while avoiding a standardized effect. Luckily for all concerned, Paul Schweikher, who was finally chosen, proved ideal. In the words of one member, everyone had different ideas and Paul molded the group. It was his personality, his ideas that carried us through.” Did you have extensive negotiations with group? Do you remember doing these things?

Schweikher: You know I don't remember a great amount of work with them as a group. I do remember having numerous conversations with the individuals, some of who were easy to work with and some of who were difficult. It was, I guess, a little like driving a large team of horses, or in this case perhaps sometimes mules. Not all, in spite of their resolution, wanted to go in the same direction. However all were reasonable people and when it was pointed out that going in the same direction would be an economy, most of them made their own modifications to fall within the reasonable limits.

Blum: One of the original owners told me that one of the first hurdles, and perhaps one of the biggest, was that some of the families wanted a

132 traditional house and you persuaded them that a modern house would be more suitable.

Schweikher: That's possible that that happened. My difficulty here is that time has really darkened it. The best way to sum it up would be to say that I'm glad to hear or read of the good report. It must have been a success because I don't ever recall hearing any bad news from that quarter.

Blum: The same gentleman told me that your original master plan for the cooperative community included a community house. There were seven families, seven houses, and a community house on communal property. Do you recognize this photograph?

Schweikher: Yes.

Blum: The community house was never built, but he said that you called it the ideal plan.

Schweikher: It’s not a particularly imaginative plan, all houses tic-tac-toe all in a row, as I look at it now.

Blum: They are all different from one another.

Schweikher: They did fit the community and that was probably our concession to the community. Each got a hunk of land one could walk out onto and I think there was a large space left for interchangeable play areas or recreation areas. What happened to the community house I have no idea.

Schweikher: One of the houses was built by Dr. and Mrs. Barry who were better off in their ability to finance their house and they went ahead faster with a larger house.

Blum: Well, apparently this was considered successful, not only by the owners

133 but also by the critics.

Schweikher: Well, I'm glad. You asked me earlier about which architects were doing work that was similar to what we were doing. I guess I would have named such people as Perkins and Will and George Fred Keck and perhaps Harry Weese. I would hesitate to name Goff. He was somebody to be admired for many different reasons. I don't think he was parallel to us in any way. He was quite independent and not to be mentioned in the same breath.

Blum: Do you think any of these other architects were interviewed for the Glenview Community job?

Schweikher: Yes, I know that Perkins and Will was interviewed because they called me and said they were. They said they were very interested in getting the project. They were always a pleasant office to know and to be in touch with. Larry and Will never said another word about the project when we got it. They soon had all the work they could handle and more.

Blum: In a 1944 Museum of Modern Art catalog this Glenview Community is cited as “beauty without monotony, pleasantly unpretentious.”

Schweikher: Isn’t that nice of the Museum of Modern Art. That's the first I ever heard of it. Isn't it odd that, for one reason or another… Why is it that I didn't hear such encouraging news more often?

Blum: Were you too busy at your drafting board to read the critics?

Schweikher: It might be or it might have been that I had secretaries who didn’t know how important that would be to me. Or maybe my partner took it on himself. If I had heard some of that encouragement it might have helped me. I never heard that before, until just now.

Blum: I received a letter from one of the original owners in the Glenview Co-

134 operative Community. In it, he said that for extra work, outside of what was already contracted for, you were to get two dollars an hour and that you were going to pay an employee of yours seventy-five cents a hour for extra work. Did you feel your services were well reimbursed at two dollars an hour?

Schweikher: Yes, I did. Money was something I needed and something I liked to receive, but I was not a hard liner in this. I always wanted the project more than the money. I know that my reaction to doing things inexpensively was common—I think this may apply to other young architects whom I know and who would rather be at work than making huge profits. But that’s not really the road to success. For a long while two or three young people asked me to associate with them, they were former students. When I did, they brought in quite a number of projects for which they asked what I thought were exorbitant fees and paid me rather handsomely for very little work on my part. They went on to considerable success. The only trouble with the whole thing was that I’m still waiting to see one of their projects brought into the public eye as a work of exceptional merit. Some concessions must have been made in some way or other to build whatever projects they had at such high fees. Somewhere the merit was lost.

Blum: Are you suggesting there has been an attitude change since you began your practice?

Schweikher: I'm suggesting that the building didn’t come first, that the income came first.

Blum: In 1940, was two dollars an hour the going rate for an architect?

Schweikher: No, not for the architect to receive, I don’t believe. Two dollars an hour might have been something that he paid as the draftsman's wage. He might pay his draftsman that much. I’m sure that I was thought of as something of a skinflint by draftsmen. I know that most of the people who worked for me in Pittsburgh considered our office to be the best office in Pennsylvania

135 outside of Lou Kahn’s and boasted of being in the best damned office in the Pittsburgh area. They didn't boast about the salaries they received. The only time any other person ever remarked about our salaries was when I invited the renowned authority on big-city planning, Kevin Lynch, to come and talk to our students at Carnegie Mellon. At the moment that I introduced him I had said, “I'm very proud to be able to say that he was one of our group of people in one of my early offices in Chicago.” He said, “Yes, I worked for Paul, at very low wages,” looking rather sourly at me. I guess Kevin nursed a grievance of some kind the rest of his life over his experiences with me although he was a very pleasant, well informed, and happy person to work with in the days when I had an office on Erie Street or wherever that office was in Streeterville. Those were happy days but, of course, all of us were really poor; times were not rollickingly full of money, full of income.

Blum: What would have been an adequate wage for an architect in 1940? Were architects paid by the hour?

Schweikher: I have no idea. I shouldn't try to answer that. I think anybody reading my answers would say, “That fool,” one way or another. I’d be way too high or way too low. I don't even remember what we were paid.

Blum: Generally speaking, do you feel that your services were reimbursed adequately?

Schweikher: No, I don’t. I think I was well under paid much of the time.

Blum: Do you think other architects felt the same way?

Schweikher: That I was, or that they were?

Blum: No, that generally the profession was poorly paid?

136 Schweikher: I think other architects did a lot better than I did. I think they wouldn’t have taken the small fees that I took. On the other hand I was not so low- priced but what some potential clients had some difficulty finding their way hiring me. We still had some of those who would ask, well, what can you do to reduce your fee? kind of questions. In what way can you do it for less? In what way can I make it worth your while and still save money? I don’t think I ever undercut my neighboring architects. I think I was in the general area. I didn’t go out shopping for good draftsmen by offering higher wages. I did not do that. I picked draftsmen when I could find them. The other aspect of that is that in the same manner in which clients looked us up, so did architects who came to me and who wanted to work in my office. It was a good office to work in. I remembered that kind of thing because in my days in Chicago, when I wanted to work, I had my eye on the office that I wanted to work in. Once I'd got past the early Graham, Anderson, Probst and White interview. I got so that I knew who the people were that I would work with and I went to them. I've already listed the offices and they were very few, just one or two. I got the job that I wanted when I wanted it.

Blum: In 1941 you were a member of the Civic Design Committee in Chicago. Who else was a member of that committee?

Schweikher: I think Al Shaw was. Al Shaw and I, I think. This was for Mayor Cermak. I don't know whether the Pereiras came in on it or not. I didn’t last long.

Blum: What was the Committee to do?

Schweikher: The only thing I can remember was that someone was going to have us criticize projects that were coming before the city, or that had been proposed by various chairmen or subalterns that had to do primarily with monuments. One proposal was for a statue of the mayor that was to be located somewhere down on Wacker Drive—at least I think this was one of

137 them—it was some kind of bust or statue out on the Outer Drive somewhere along the park system. I think I got as far as that with my interest in it and left. I got out, quit. I didn’t ever receive any kind of remuneration. I didn't get paid for anything and I was happy.

Blum: This was civic service?

Schweikher: I think it was. I guess that's what it was. I never met the mayor. It was some subaltern that met with us in the mayor' s office.

Blum: Did you approve the sculpture of the mayor to be installed?

Schweikher: No, I wouldn't have approved anything that they were doing. It was all rubbish, pure, unadulterated rubbish.

Blum: There are some drawings that you made that were titled Memorial to the 33rd Division. Did that ever get built?

Schweikher: No, but that was a different thing altogether. That had a rather quick, unsatisfactory history. As I remember it I think Herrick Hammond and John Holabird as old patriots and soldiers brought the project to me. They said the 33rd Division would like to raise money to erect a memorial to the Division and its performance in the World War I and would I be interested in preparing drawings. I said, “Most certainly. Sure I would.” They said, “Well, it's been proposed that a field house be designed.” The field house was not for the use of the 33rd Division, but was to be put in a neighborhood where there were many children, where such facilities weren't readily available, were unaffordable, and where such a thing would be appropriate. Suggestions were made for some triangular areas somewhere, now that I look back on it, in the general area of Rush Street and its intersections. The difficulty was that there was very little park land available around there. But we started and I made a design that I think Northern ArizonaUniversity has in its Library. I wasn't too pleased with it

138 because we made it too rapidly. It would have done as a starter, to open discussion out of which might have come an appropriate design. But I was happy to have it and to work on it. I didn't have direct access to the committee. I was working with my two recommenders, Holabird and, I guess, Hammond. Time went by, things were happening, and again the threat of war was rumbling around us. Holabird called me finally and said, “Paul we've had meetings with the design committee of the 33rd Division and they don't want a building. I opposed this because I think they should have a building, it should be something useful, but the useful committee was not effective. What they want is a memorial slab or monument. Would you still be interested?” I said, “I’ll sure try but I’m with you, it’s not a thing that I enjoy.” So I sat down and I think NAU has that too. It’s some kind of an obelisk—a little horror—we called it by a variety of obscene words and I let it go at that. Nothing ever happened.

Blum: The committee never approved your second design?

Schweikher: No, they weren’t approved. I should have had just the good, hard business sense and sent a bill to them. I did the design. I did two designs for them. In those days you could do an awful lot for a very little as compared with today. I think the project was going to cost about $150,000. I should have sent them a bill for $15,000 probably. I didn't send them a thing. I just shut up and went about my business.

Blum: Was anything ever built?

Schweikher: Holabird could have been a sort of a good guy and said, “Look this is an architect. I pushed him into this.”

Blum: Were you the only architect they asked to design something?

Schweikher: I was the only one that I knew that was asked. If they asked somebody else, I would have thought for example that they might have gone to Al

139 Shaw. Al Shaw was an old ex-Navy man, but they didn’t. They might have gone to Owings, who was struggling. They were the key people of that time; I wasn't really in their class at all and didn't consider myself in their class. Perkins and Will began to edge into that class. Isn't it odd, I don't know why, but Larry called me up and said, “Do you think it would be all right for me to ask Saarinen to associate with us in a school that may become the Crow Island School?” I said, “I don't see why not. Of course.” “Good, glad that you think so.” There was that example of Larry and Will, in spite of the fact there was a kind of a little grudge that they carried against me from when we were together at General Houses. It was a very brief time and perhaps I sensed something that really wasn't there. I think it was perhaps some carryover from their school days at Cornell versus Yale or something of that sort, but it went away. We lost touch.

Blum: Do you think they considered you a competitor or a rival for similar commissions?

Schweikher: Possibly, possibly, I don't know.

Blum: Were they doing a lot of residential work?

Schweikher: No, I don't think so. Phil Will built his own house, I guess. I can't remember what Larry did. They may have had something, but again, I was not paying any attention to their volume of work. There was this sudden call from Larry and...

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Schweikher: There was controversial opinion about the propriety of Perkins and Will inviting Eliel Saarinen to join them as an associate on what was to become the Crow Island School. I know that I said that I thought it was a fine idea. I saw nothing improper about it and could only wish them well.

140 Blum: Did you ever have an opportunity to meet or work with either of the Saarinens?

Schweikher: The closest I ever came to Eliel Saarinen was in my acquaintance and long friendship with Leland Atwood who had been a student of the senior Saarinen at the University of Michigan. Lee talked frequently about Saarinen and admired him. Later, belonging to another history in my New Haven practice and my appointment at Yale, Eero and I met as associates on a project for Yale, one of the science buildings, and we talked briefly. The first time was at Morry's. Morry's was an eating and drinking establishment. Then one or two times at Harry's, also such an establishment in a different location. I guess it was the second time that we met that Saarinen suggested he withdraw from the association, which included at the beginning Douglas Orr. Saarinen, I think, did not want to continue that association. I was boxed in, I felt, and stayed with the project.

Blum: Do you think that your work has been influenced by the elder Saarinen's work in any way?

Schweikher: I think the best answer is not at all. I can think of no way that I was ever effected by anything that the Saarinens did.

Blum: In the December 1954, issue of Art in America, Vincent Scully likens your Maryville Chapel and Theatre to work by the elder Saarinen, with the slender columns and the unifying of various parts.

Schweikher: I'd forgotten that. I was flattered by the reference, delighted to be associated with such capable and distinguished people, but there was no purposeful borrowing on my part. However, without knowing it, I may have leaned toward the Swedish and Finnish work in general. My travels, not in Finland but in Sweden, persuaded me that they had a fine and strong direction and in an adaptation of classical refinement to new structural techniques. The only building that I did in which I was consciously looking

141 at Swedish or Northern European architecture was the church in Austin. As I’ve said, I think David Adler must have recognized that when he complimented me on that church because it was one of my first buildings. David and I had met on a jury for the Plym Scholarship at the University of Illinois and after the jury, standing outside in the corridor, he complimented me on the building. I thought it was because I had remembered that David had looked carefully at a book on modern Swedish architecture at the time that we were doing the Clow house. A kind of seal to that can be noticed in the wall around the house and the urns by Carl Milles.

Blum: You speak about the influence of Swedish architecture on your church, your trip to Japan and admiration of the Imperial Hotel subsequently influencing features of your own house in Roselle. In the 1950s several of your houses reflect the spirit of Mies. How conscious are you of these individual practitioners’ styles, or perhaps just the spirit of their work, influencing your work? You seem to have digested them and in some way they have come out in some of your projects?

Schweikher: Yes. The answer is difficult for me. I remember Mies telling some students, in later years, that Schweikher was one who had a philosophy. My own feeling is that I never really found nor formed a philosophy and many of my professional colleagues would probably agree. But one thing kept forming in my mind from project to project, and I guess I may have reinforced it by reading and re-reading Thoreau, who somewhere said in the matter of creative action, I suppose it was, that one should “simplify, simplify, simplify.” I'm certain of this one thing, for good or bad: from project to project in houses, in institutional buildings, and so on, it was a search for the simplest way to solve the problem. The design of a detail, the laying out of a plan, development of an enclosure, the elevations, I wanted to simplify. If I didn't look for this in the work of others, I think I saw it in the work of the people that I admired. I took from those people and their projects some inspiration that had to do with the simplest, most direct way of doing things. This led me through some important works on the part of

142 others and I felt that the man who had perhaps succeeded most directly in this was Mies van der Rohe. I'm certain that some of my projects, much smaller than the things Mies was doing, must have reflected this. However, I was keeping to my own theories of structure and expression because I think the selection of materials is important. Wright interested me in his strong emphasis on structural architectural materials, that is, in which the selection of the material itself became a part of the design process. Wood is perhaps the best example in which one sees color, texture, grain, and perhaps in particular, there’s a tactile response to. You touch glass and there’s little or no reaction, you touch stone, it’s cold, concrete, even colder, but wood is always warm, friendly, human.

Blum: But unlike Mies, who perfected what he did and then continued basically to repeat that, your work reflects change and an absorption of other ideas.

Schweikher: The answer would be involved. Perhaps one thing, however, was my being impressed by the opinion of others, which was expressed to me once or twice, that I had an eye for scale and proportion. I like to think that that was. If simplicity was to be a quality and perhaps an appreciation of material, I added it as a requirement in my own mind so I’d know whether or not I attained it. I know that a requirement in my design has always been proportion and scale. To the novice or to the non-professional I find it difficult to explain. I'll try to get at it quickly. Scale would be the relatedness of the whole by the manipulation of detail to adjust to human use. That is, scale of course is the simple objective of making steps adjust to the path of a person, diagonally or vertically, of having windows be sufficient to see out of and for a selection of what was being seen, that heights be adjusted again, either using the human form as indicating immensity or making the small building adaptable to the size of a person and his use of it and so on. These are certainly objectives, I’m sure, that are in the minds of most architects who work as artists as well as engineers. The other thing is that they may not all occur at once in a given project. I can't say whether that’s good or bad, sometimes it's good, sometimes bad if

143 you observe simplicity and leave out other sensitive reactions. That, in a mixture, is probably part of what went on and goes on in the formation of an architectural project.

Blum: Implied in what you just said was the idea that an architect decides where things are placed according to his artistic sense. As an architect, when you had a client who had definite ideas about what they wanted, how did you and the client work things out perhaps if the client’s ideas didn't agree with what you felt the structure demanded?

Schweikher: Probably no differently than any other architect. One yielded to strong personal preferences, particularly if they made sense, not particularly to me but to the owner to be. I did the best with what may have been a poor or indifferent limitation. If it was something that offended my senses then I took a strong stand. Sometimes I went down in defeat and sometimes the client joined me. The end result was not, as I learned in time, always a success, no matter which way you chose. Most architects and artists learn over a period of years that there’s something between you and the object that you create in architecture. Not only the client, but the client’s ability to afford what he wants to do. That also influences your solution. As I look at large projects now, of which I am not a part, I am awe struck by the sums of money that are made available to the architect for a free expression in his solution. In my projects costs were always, most of them, quite small compared with what was going on even then. Costs were always an important part, whether it was an institutional building or an individual house. Also, I didn't mean by the rather philosophical reference, to exclude the always-present problem of what could be spent.

Blum: Are you saying that the limitations the client places on a project would assist your creativity to find a solution or to limit it?

Schweikher: I think the architect enjoyed the fantasy that he could take limitations and make something positive of them. Perhaps that happened once in a while.

144 My guess is that if I were to make this a particular study in my own work that I would find that the client's limitations, the client's slowness to see the value in a departure from the norm, or his inability to afford what he himself would like to have, were impediments to the total design rather than virtues or happy challenges.

Blum: In light of that comment, how did you work out the demands of the Great Lakes Officers’ Housing commission? Apparently the government had some say in what you did.

Schweikher: I can't recall the government bringing any limitations other than those of the sum available and, of course, the number of personnel that they wished to house in the project. The rest was quite free, the selection of materials... Well no, that isn't accurate either. They began, of course, with a selected site, a rather difficult site on a kind of bluff. It was not easy to work out the bluff to have ready access to the naval station, but I'm afraid that the work that we did on it was mostly our own doing and that the government accepted. Once we had discussed the project and the general accommodations that they felt the officer, either in training or as a teacher would require, once those had been generally discussed, they let it pretty much to us as the architects to produce the solution. I suppose the best thing for me to do at this point is add that after I had designed it, and most of the design was in my hands, and after it had been built, I was not delighted with the finished product. The scale bothered me, the complexity of the solution bothered me, the detail bothered me, and I wouldn't have called it a design success.

Blum: How did you get the government as a client to do the officers housing building?

Schweikher: I think this came about through Elting's closer association with the officer of personnel and perhaps some of the administrative personnel at Great Lakes because of his proximity to the station. It's possible that later when

145 we became members of the naval reserve I noticed that quite a few of the people, officer personnel in particular, were to be seen in the Lake Forest area and a variety of places, like the country club and private parties. There was a great social circulation and although I never talked to Elting about this, suddenly we had the commission in the office. Whether we went through the same procedure as Skidmore and Owings did in their beginnings to get the mess hall, I don't know.

Blum: Did your office often get jobs through social connections?

Schweikher: Probably. It’s hard to say. Neither Elting nor I were habitual club members or leaned on friends to lead the way to business connections and commissions. But certainly commissions did come through friendly relationships and references.

Blum: How did the U. S. government differ from an individual client?

Schweikher: Particularly in those days I was rather timid about such things. I think I was even a little antagonistic in my feelings, primarily because there is a truism I believe: it’s difficult to design a building with a committee. You have to deal with an individual, or at least a group acting as an individual, or through an individual, so that trying to please a design committee is a laborious and difficult and frequently a negative effort, in my opinion.

Blum: Was it your responsibility to present the design for officers housing to the committee?

Schweikher: I think it was left up to our firm, not me as an individual, to produce the solution. I think that—again, it’s rather foggy now in my head as to how the work went—time was a factor. The navy had to get something built in a hurry. They weren’t there to discuss aesthetics very much. They wanted it to be home-like I'm sure, to the degree that any military establishment could

146 be home-like, so that we tried to provide certain amenities on the part of the structure that would make it seem somewhat different than the military life at the training station. Other than that we were left pretty much alone and the acceptance of the design was rather quick and practical.

Blum: That was in 1942, just before you closed your office.

Schweikher: That’s right.

Blum: The year before that, in 1941, the Lewis house in Park Ridge, a small house on which you associated with Bill Fyfe, won a House of the Year award. What was it about this house, in your opinion, that entitled it to that award?

Schweikher: I think two or three things: it was innovative, it incorporated one or two ideas that I had about wood construction, but Bill Fyfe brought to it at least two details that we used a number of times successfully in other houses. One was the use of a floor system made up of air chambers formed by brick varying in depth from six to twelve inches and running as a network under a masonry floor, a brick or tile floor, that was heated by a warm air furnace that circulated the air by fans through this duct system. I think it provided a kind of overflow versatility by the introduction of ducts that could be opened from the system for direct air and throughout this house—I believe it worked quite well. Of course it was a strong influence on the design because it meant a brick or tile floor throughout the house, throughout all of the enclosed part of the house. The other strong influence was Bill’s introduction of a detail for natural ventilation on the exterior walls by making, wherever possible, a continuous band of glass window to look out of, and putting louvered vents with insulating doors under the windows. The louvered vents could be closed but also could be opened for natural circulation of air. The floor and the vents were strong influences on the design of course and important solutions for an economical house-building method. One other aspect of the design, I think, was the bend in the roof—a

147 design feature that may have caused more trouble than it was worth but that made for a certain grace in attaching the house to the ground. More important than that was an aspect of the house that originated with the two of us, at least I like to think so. The house was on a corner lot and the two sides that faced the two streets had raised walls to permit a certain amount of view toward the street but to screen the life within the house. This may not be exactly accurate, but it was the intention and we realized it somewhat in the design. In a sense this took a rectangle and made two sides with relatively high walls that acted as the visual screen, where the inner walls on the site faced into the garden. I don’t know what the various purposes were for the garden but it could have been for any kind of domestic use. The tendency was to allow the glass to go to the floor, or much nearer the floor, perhaps there was just enough room to provide a little more of the louvered ventilation underneath the windows. This was again a strong design feature. We ran into a little difficulty on that at one point. A neighborhood group seeing the design took exception to it as being unrelated to the neighborhood and undesirable. A hearing was given for the architects and the people who were objecting through the Park Ridge City Council, as I remember it—I'm perhaps not accurate in this but I'm going to say it anyway—and that I think that one of the members of the council was Alfonso Iannelli. At any rate, Lewis, at our persuasion, hired a lawyer. I remember being in the lawyer’s office at which time he talked to the opposing legal representative with the threat of mandamus proceedings if he didn’t get some outspoken defined expression of the objections, to make them clear, and to make a defined decision.

Blum: What was the objection to the house?

Schweikher: It was never clear to me. It happened in another house some years later. I couldn't believe it then but I think that the house was described as being bad because the windows didn’t look out onto the street. The only answer that I could get from those that I talked to informally at the meeting was that you couldn't look in from the street and therefore that was unfriendly.

148 In any event Iannelli laughed at his colleagues, scorned their objections and supported the architect strongly and vociferously and at some point, with the threat of Lewis' lawyer to mandamus the whole proceedings, the house was accepted and Lewis was able to live as happily as he could ever after.

Blum: That's an interesting comment on the attitude of a small community such as Park Ridge in 1941.

Schweikher: Just let me add to that if I may, that time went on and at some point a client outside the city of Chicago, but still related strongly to the area, a person in South Bend, a Mr. Keller, built a house along the outskirts of the principal golf course. He was a member of the club. When the house was finished, there was quite a hulabaloo over the two end walls. The house was similar in some respects to the Lewis house, or certainly in the general character of houses that we had been doing. The house was a rectangle with one of the long sides facing the golf course, a delight and requirement of Keller’s. The other side provided a sparse use of glass in small windows and, of course, the entrance and the garage. At each end, next to or facing onto the building limit line, the house was finished in a solid two-foot-thick stone wall of the handsomest granite that we could find, laid beautifully without an opening of any kind from floor to eaves. We were surprised by the outcry against the building as it neared completion by the neighbors on each side, who again raised the question of the unfriendly house that refused to look at either of its neighbors. Why did they think it was unfriendly? Because you couldn't see in. You could see out, but not in. Seeing in was supposed to be the sign of friendliness. We had the Lewis house to refer to and as far as I can remember the argument became a local argument. I can’t recall that Keller was obliged to defend himself with legal help. The problem must have gone away because he lived there happily for many years until he decided to move from South Bend for quite different reasons than any unhappiness in South Bend.

Blum: Weren’t you also following a Chicago example set by H. H. Richardson in

149 the Glessner house in which a rather fortress-like stone front had few windows but the rear had many windows that opened onto an interior garden?

Schweikher: Yes and maybe that was in Bill Fyfe's mind initially; it wasn’t in mine. But there isn't any doubt but what it had every aspect of the Glessner problem and followed the same solution. I can't recall that the Glessner house was in our minds together. I know I didn't think of it, but it would have been to any knowing person an obvious similarity.

Blum: Did you design the Lewis house?

Schweikher: No, I think it was entirely Bill Fyfe's design and a very successful one.

Blum: You and Mr. Fyfe at that time must have been very sympathetic.

Schweikher: Yes, because later Bill was the principal designer of the John Stone house in Topeka.

Blum: In the Lewis house article it mentions that there was a trace of the oriental flavor discernable and that Bill Fyfe had had training with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin.

Schweikher: That's possible. I doubt that I brought much of that influence.

[Tape 7: Side 1]

Blum: In 1940 you were a juror for a stove competition held at the Arizona Biltmore. Would you say something about that?

Schweikher: This was something that came really second hand to me. Howie Myers of Architectural Forum telephoned to say that the American Stove people, I think it was, had asked the Forum to form a jury to judge a competition for

150 a new design of a kitchen range. I think the fuel was gas. The requirements for the range were to be similar to a popular commercial design. It was to have had many burners, an oven, a drying shelf, and so on, to be made of metal. But the color scheme and general make could be at the discretion of the designer. I don't recall that there were very strong impositions. Part of the objective was to discover new forms as well as immediately salable objects. I think about seven hundred contestants had responded to the advertisement of the competition. The work had been done and collected by a professional advisor to the manufacturer and a jury had been specified which included George Nelson, Gardner Daley, Ed Stone, Peter Schladermundt and Sam Marx. Howie's message was that Sam couldn’t make it, would I take his place. We were to be put up by the Forum and the American Stove people at the Arizona Biltmore in practically royal quarters and given royal treatment. The jury would probably be in session, according to Howie, for the better part of a week. It all sounded good to me, with all expenses paid and good company all around. So I arrived and I knew most of the people from past experience. Schladermundt had been a classmate of mine at Yale. Gardner Daley was a new person to meet. I knew of Ed Stone and his work in small houses and he seemed to recall having seen some of my work, so that was a friendly meeting. The jury was a friendly jury all the way around and Howie Myers and Elizabeth Gordon from the magazine were there. She acted as a kind of professional advisor I think, not necessarily as a critical juror. She was there to tell us whether what we were looking at was practical from a woman’s point of view, or a cook's point of view, so it was probably a good jury. The drawings were set up by hotel personnel in a ballroom of the hotel. It was a beautiful hotel. We went to work. Somewhere in the first day there was a moment of silence and I looked around and a man in a pork pie hat, wood cane and black cape was standing at the door. I recognized him of course as Frank Lloyd Wright. In a rather majestic gesture Frank lifted his cane and swept it across all of us and said, “Does it take so many to do so little?” This made everybody laugh and it started many replies to Wright, none of them very serious. Wright took it with a stone face and said, “I’ve come to invite you all to

151 supper.” George Nelson was also a member of the jury. George had been a classmate of mine and Peter Schladermundt’s also at Yale so we had a former history together. We arrived at Wright's rather late in the day. I can't remember the time of year so I don't know in what position the sun was, although my recollection is that it was getting dark and that fires were being lighted in the semi-outdoor fireplaces—I think there were two of them with a shelter over them. Somewhere along the way Wright and I got to talking about such things as the American credo of architecture, neither one of us understanding the other. Interrupted by Wright's sudden jump to his feet, I whirled around at a bright flash—this was after we'd been served hotdogs for our dinner—I turned around and flames were leaping out of the big fireplace and licking along the underside of the wood overhang. Wright said, “Oh my god, I hope it’s not going to be another Spring Green.” I think we all ran in a variety of directions in which we thought we might be helpful. Some thought we could run and get a bucket water, others wanted to grab a garden hose. But the students must have been trained well because very quickly a hose appeared and water was directed and other people tore at the rest of the paper. What had happened, I guess, was that the boxes in which the hotdogs had arrived, or the buns or whatever, had been thrown rather tumultuously into the fireplace pit and there was excelsior in with it and people didn’t realize the explosive power and the whole thing had a minor explosion. It was finally quelled and then put out altogether but conversation was weak and rather lost after that. Wright went on muttering and mumbling about his experiences with fire and it's odd that most of us knew about as much about it as he did. We were tired with the whole experience and went to bed. George Nelson and I were assigned to the roof bunks and I spent the rest of the night fighting candle flames and moths and trying to adjust the canvas protector against the desert wind. It was really quite a pleasant experience. Somebody in the Wright establishment at the time of building Taliesin West had provided triangular and rectangular holes in the roof that permitted one to see the kitchen activities that were going on, which at that time was mostly washing up whatever hardware there was as a result of our dining. We

152 awoke the next morning for breakfast and then Nelson and I had to leave early so he said goodbye. But not without knowing that we were due at noon the next day at a luncheon to be given by Forum magazine to all personnel in honor of Wright. Wright and his wife, Olgivanna, and Olgivanna’s daughter, Svetlana, and Wes Peters, Svetlana’s husband, were to attend. Most of us were present, with Wright at one end of a long table that was beautifully outfitted with carafes, cut glass, silverware, napkins, and tablecloths. At the other end, the host of the afternoon, Howie Myers, stood while the rest of us were being seated. Olgivanna was directly across from me, her daughter at my left, I can’t remember if there was anybody between me and Howie. I was close to Howie for reasons not very clear to me. We waited and waited and Wright was carrying on a monologue at his end of the table, thoroughly enjoying himself I'm sure. There were no drinks served that I can remember. Gardner Daley and Ed Stone were the major drinkers and they had taken care of themselves plentifully in the Jury Room, but Wright was suddenly disturbed that we were sitting without any service. Two or three waiters were standing around the table and Howie was standing and Wright said, “What's the matter?” Howie said, “We're waiting for the arrival... You'll see that we have two empty chairs, we’re waiting for others to arrive.” I think he then added, “But, I think we've waited long enough, why don’t we...” and he looked around in a rather distracted way. “Is there any way that we could shorten the table and do away with these empty chairs?” The servants moved toward the table, but Wright quickly got to his feet, reached under this beautifully decorated and equipped table and the tablecloths, grabbed part of what had made up the table, which appeared to have been a collection of other tables, pulled mightily and the table came out, knocking over a few chairs, including Wright's own chair, and scattering the water carafes, glassware, silverware and candelabra and other decorations in all directions over a tile floor, which multiplied the stuff by breaking up the glassware. Wright, unperturbed, pulled what there was of a tablecloth at that end off too. He then drew up his own chair, sat in it, and said, “There, that shortens it doesn't it?” Howie, with a rather wry grin on his face, said, “It certainly

153 does.” I think there was some smiling and I guess it was in the minds of each of us to make it a minimum occurrence. There was a terrific scramble among the service people to get the place cleaned up. Mops, brooms, pails and things appeared but they were very quiet about it and the cleanup took no time whatsoever. Truly enough, that had shortened it. The table resumed as though nothing had happened. Somehow, everything went smoothly enough after that, except for one little instance. I looked across the table because my partner, Svetlana, had said, “Oh, mother!” sounding rather shocked. I looked across the table and sure enough, Olgivanna was almost into her soup plate. I guess she had fainted. Whether this was for effect or whether it was an accumulation of shock from Wright's action I never discovered. Wright was carrying on a monologue at the other end of the table and was not to be interrupted. The daughter got up, walked around, and took hold of her mother. I think Wesley Peters, the daughter's husband, grabbed Olgivanna by the elbows and lifted her. Together they went out of the room. The exit to the room was down past Wright's chair. Wright didn't bother to get up. He looked up and waved at his wife and muttered something like, goodbye. I can't remember just the exact expression. And so the luncheon stumbled on to its close.

Blum: No wonder you remember that jury experience. Now, by that time had you built the Louis Upton house in Arizona?

Schweikher: I was building it.

Blum: Did you have any contact with Frank Lloyd Wright because of that house?

Schweikher: Yes, a minor one.

Blum: What was it?

Schweikher: He said nothing to me during the building of it. We met only that one time, he and I. But considerably later, perhaps months later, Lou was apparently

154 surprised because had he invited Wright to dinner and Wright had arrived with a number of other people. The house was a rather large house and the Uptons were able rather quickly to add whatever they needed in the way of somebody to help at the table and so the dinner proceeded in a normal way. I don't know who prompted taking Wright around—it was a large enough establishment so that it was perhaps made into a tour—but they took Wright and some of his group around the house. They went around the house, they talked some more, perhaps at each station the way Lou told it; they saw the guest bedrooms, the garage, the indoors, and the outdoors, the cactus garden, and they finally came back to the point of departure. As Wright was putting on his hat and cape Upton told me that he said, “Now Mr. Wright, we've shown you the house. You've been our guest and we've been delighted to have you present. But part of the reason for asking you here was to get your opinion of the work which Mr. Schweikher says was strongly influenced by you.” Perhaps this was because he used the same stonemason and therefore similar stone, and the similar concrete and stone method. “Won't you say something about the house, the architect, or both?” Wright hardly hesitated and said, “Mr. Upton, you're lucky to have such a fine house by such a poor architect.” That's the end of that story.

Blum: In 1941 you made a second trip to Mexico, this is just prior to the war. During that trip were you aware of being influenced by the architecture that you saw?

Schweikher: No. We went for the purpose of architecture. I was adding to the Mexican experience. The first time, as I may have explained earlier, our first visit to Mexico was mostly the high points of the typical tourist with an emphasis on churches and museums and perhaps the Mexican beer and food and so on. This time Dorothy and I went for the purpose of architecture and with an archaeological accent.

Blum: Where did you go?

155 Schweikher: Well, again, Mexico City. But I think we must have also gone to Oaxaca. Yes, we always went at some point to Oaxaca and to Mitla and surrounding territory, but on this trip again mysteriously we got to Yucatan and before reaching Chichen Itza we stopped at Uxmal as a new experience for us. I'd been given a letter of introduction to Sylvanus Morley by an old friend, Wynn Elting’s father, Victor. We found Morley at his sunshelter with a crew of Indians listening to the radio. Morley was delighted, apparently, with the letter and threw his arms around me, saying that it had been a long time since he had been in civilization. He urged both of us to come to the radio and he said, “There's something terrible happening,” or something to that effect. “Come and listen.” So we sat to listen to rather wild and disjointed rehearsals of what was still in progress, I guess, in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Morley would look at me in shock every now and then, as I remember. Finally the broadcast dissolved into a kind of garbled, indirect mixture of Spanish and English, too difficult to pick out. At which point Morley said, “Come on, we have our own work to do. How are you for climbing?” We said we thought we were equipped. He said, “I'm going to show you what's happening. We’re just taking the covering off one of the main masks at the top of the great pyramid.” We started up just with Morley. He kept saying, “Keep things in situ. Keep things in situ.” In other words: don't let a stone go. If you step on a stone and it moves, hang on to it, and put it back, which we tried to do. This made the very steep climb most difficult. The stone stairs hadn't been uncovered at that point and there was no other assistance. It was difficult to hold a rather large carving in place if you disturbed the earth in, over, or around it. At any rate, we reached the top. The mask apparently had been covered to protect it from rain or whatever during the night and it was being worked on. There was a small crew of people with whiskbrooms and trowels standing around, waiting for our arrival. At that point Morley said, “Uncover it,” and they gently pulled the canvas off. Here was this magnificent mask. We talked a lot about the pyramid and Morley's books and a variety of things and then looked rather quickly around because the day was getting on and we had yet to stop at other places—Sayula and two or three other places on our

156 way to Chichen Itza—so we left, as I remember it.

Blum: Do you feel that the experience of seeing the Mayan structures in Yucatan subsequently affected your own work?

Schweikher: I think it probably affected it but I would never be able to point it out in any discernable way. I didn't come back to make stepped pyramids or to lean my walls in the direction of a temple wall or a pyramidal wall or to introduce the stunted, round column with the tiger capitals, none of that. I think I would like to have had a good excuse to do so but there was none. I'm reminded that on this same trip I was a kind of self-appointed agent for the Arts Club of Chicago—the appointment being endorsed by Rue Shaw, the president—to find and talk with, if possible, significant Mexican painters for an exhibition of new Mexican work to be arranged for the Arts Club. I had talked with Dan Rich of the Art Institute who recommended a number of new painters whose work I should look up in whatever exhibitions there were and if possible to find Mexican galleries. Of the general group Chavez Marado was perhaps the leader of the youngest and they responded with enthusiasm and a quantity of quite remarkable drawings and paintings. I don't recall whether Rivera did the same or not. We did have a rather interesting meeting, my wife and I, with Rivera on the day before Pearl Harbor. We had simply called on Rivera—our only qualifications being that we were members of the Arts Club and we said as much. That was sufficient to admit us to his studios. I remember that I was less interested in his work at that time, not because of any lack of importance to me or to the world, but because I was for that particular trip more interested in his collection of antiques and archaeological materials, a huge collection, which he had displayed in the courtyard and in the outbuildings of his house. He was happy to show us through that and the largest fruit and vegetable salad I ever saw in my life was in a huge earthenware bowl was on his dining table. These were the main objects of our visit. Then, we sat over glasses of Mexican beer for a long while in the mid-afternoon, talking about the nervous situation in Europe. At this

157 meeting Rivera was strong in insisting upon the dangers to the world from Germany and the explosion that was about to happen there, to cover all of Europe. I recall that his emphasis was that all our interests, efforts, and alarm should be pointed in that direction. Dorothy, unaccountably to me—it was something she hadn't spoken to me about at all—countered with, “What about Japan?” “Oh,” said Rivera, “there’s no danger from that corner.” It was the next day when we went on to see and meet Sylvanus Morley that we were told of Pearl Harbor.

Blum: Were you able to arrange a loan of Rivera’s paintings for the Arts Club?

Schweikher: I was about to add that the painting excursion was a success as far as the new painters—Marado and his colleagues. We had more than enough splendid paintings by new people, too numerous to attempt to recall here, but nothing from Rivera, nothing of his paintings and in this case particularly nothing of the great collection.

Blum: Why?

Schweikher: I think the why is simply because of the war and the news of war and the preoccupation that it must have caused. Rivera seemed emotionally, at the time we were talking to him, overcome by the whole fact of the European thing and what must have happened the night following our visit to him was perhaps catastrophic. He seemed to be a very sensitive man and it must have shaken him too much. Rue and I both wrote to him a number of times. I think that Dan Rich also wrote a letter about the Art Institute's interest. But none of us heard from him at all. I had other things to do and let it drop from my interest. I did not pursue it. None of us was going to Mexico to follow it up because our interests also were redirected because of Pearl Harbor.

Blum: By 1941 you had visited Mexico twice. Was Mexico a popular place for architects to go to observe architecture?

158 Schweikher: I don’t know.

Blum: Were paintings by Mexican artists of special interest to people at that time who were interested in art?

Schweikher: I do not know that either. I did not find a lot of fellow collectors. On the other hand of course we were hardly to be classed as collectors, only the advertisers to that. I think there's been a steady increase of interest in Mexican art.

Blum: I wonder if architects had an interest in things Mexican at the time.

Schweikher: Yes, thought not as heavy as you might have expected, you might have expected more. Knowing that you've been in Mexico, you know that Mexico City is a little like Paris in the sense that it is the center of all things in Mexico. If you don’t find a painting gallery in Mexico… Things may have changed, maybe Guadalajara or some growing place has now added galleries of art. In the periods in which we were visiting, if you didn't find it in Mexico City you weren't going to find it. Even, of course, picking up the little odds and ends of statuettes and relics on the fields, the farmers had already formed the habit of getting these into the city where they could get good money, at least a proper return. When you picked up something at a ruin, at Teotihuacan or Mount Alban or Mitla or Palenque or Chichen Itza you could be pretty sure that others had already looked at it and spurned it. You took it because they hadn't damaged it in any way and it was still valuable. I would say no. We saw the slow demise of Sanborn’s as a center of arte popolar. It simply, I guess, found no profit in that. It was still a nice place to visit but not what it had been originally.

Blum: After your Mexican trip, you came back to the United States to join the naval reserve. You were in the naval reserve until 1945, at which time you and Wynn Elting got together and reopened your office as Schweikher and

159 Elting. Elting had been with your office prior to the war, but now he was your only partner because Lamb had been killed during the war.

Schweikher: Yes. In the early part of the war Lamb was killed in an airplane crash on his way to a civilian attaché position in London. It had to do with aerial bombardment.

Blum: When you and Elting reopened your office did you have any perception at the time that perhaps things had changed in terms of housing patterns, housing needs, and industrialization?

Schweikher: Well, not a real awareness, but I think we were partly aware.

Blum: What did you expect to do when you returned?

Schweikher: What Elting and I did, at his suggestion, not mine, for a while after the meeting at Palmer Lake in Colorado at the Paepckes… It was just a meeting between Elting and me it had nothing to do with the Paepckes, other than that it was on their property. Elting somewhat pushed his idea of our conjunction. In suggesting this and that direction, he told me that we had a date with Nat Owings, for one thing. He also told me that Nat and some of his partners had suggested that we take on some of the work that Skidmore Owings and Merrill had on its shelves, some minor projects that we were pleased to try to do out in Roselle. We hadn't quite set up our tables and our storage bins but from SOM we got a little manufacturing plant and one or two other things that we made sketches for. We turned them over to the SOM office but never heard anything more about them. We assumed that they were small projects that simply hadn't gone any further. We did, at one point, meet with Nat Owings. I think it was Wynn Elting's hope that we would somehow or other be hired or join forces. I did not participate much in the conversation because that was not my interest. The first part of the discussion took place in Nat’s office. Somewhere along the way I remember finding ourselves out in the street, Nat and Wynn and I, walking along and

160 comparing ages. Then we arrived at a building and went up in an elevator to what I now remember must have been the Attic Club. Was there such a club? It was in the center of town, rather than over in the old architectural haunts that I could remember, like the Tavern Club for one and the Cliff Dwellers for another. It was not in that general area. We had luncheon and it was there that Elting asked the question that was uppermost in his mind, which was “What about Schweikher and I becoming a part of the SOM partnership?” Nat obviously already...

[Tape 7: Side 2]

Schweikher: Nat must have been quite skilled in conversations of this kind because he had a rather gentle smile as he asked Elting what he had in mind. Elting said, “Well, we could be important new partners.” Nat said, “In what way?” Elting had no definite objective in mind, in my opinion. He said, “Well, we'd like to start out by being named as part of the firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill and Elting and Schweikher,” or something to that effect. “Well,” Nat said, “I think I know something about what Paul does, but what would you do?” Elting, who had not really had a wide experience up to this point, was a bit stumped. He didn't give a satisfactory reply and I doubt that no matter how strong his reply might have been it would have only been luncheon rhetoric to Nat, who obviously knew his way, had found his way, and was in no doubt about where Skidmore Owings and Merrill was going to go. I remember that during the entire conversation in Nat's office he somehow or other managed to reach and hold onto a gold medal—I guess it came from the AIA—and he turned this in his hands while we talked, which was effective on me. I don't know what its effect on Wynn was. That's about the beginning and the end of my relationship with Nat, other than that he and I met once or twice on local juries and had a kind of pleasant verbal battle going on that would pick up from time to time based on whatever nonsense was current.

Blum: When you heard Wynn Elting ask if you and he could join the SOM

161 organization, what were your feelings about such an arrangement?

Schweikher: I expressed those to Nat because Nat turned and asked, “Paul is this something you'd like to do?” I said, “No.”

Blum: What did you have in mind, other than joining a large organization?

Schweikher: Well Nat’s reply to me was a good one. He said, “I can sympathize with that. Perhaps I understand. You know I'm heavily in the banks.” I assumed that meant he had borrowed a lot of money. They already had the Tennessee Valley Authority job and were well along with it, if I understood Nat correctly. I said, “Well, that's something that I don't know enough about and I would like to stay clear of it.” Well, you can't very successfully do that in a partnership. I think he knew exactly what his whole direction was going to be and he followed it with considerable success.

Blum: How do you think the growth of these huge national and international firms affected a practice such as yours, which was small and personal?

Schweikher: Other than to annoy us, or at least annoy me sometimes for not being a better businessman and somehow or other climbing that particular money ladder to success, I made no effort to understand how to go about it. I was sure that it was a street that could be followed, a path that could be followed. I was fearful, I suppose that I would lose my individual independence. I would become, in a sense perhaps a higher paid employee but really an employee of my colleagues. I felt that all along. In fact in a later conversation I remember saying something of the sort to Nat Owings. He did send us some of these things to do and then later we had a very brief meeting. We had been at the Arts Club, or somewhere in town, when he said, “I haven’t heard anything more from you,” or something to that effect. I said, “Well, I think I'll go my own way.” And he didn't know then, nor did I, whether I would go on with Wynn Elting or what. I didn’t know the answer to that. It was a pleasant and social relationship, a pleasant

162 friendly relationship, but our business relationship never really took a determined pattern.

Blum: Did you and Elting have any mutual goals when you began your partnership?

Schweikher: Yes. Elting was very accommodating and that could have been in a sense the downfall of the partnership to the degree that we dissolved it at a convenient point for me. He never insisted on any pattern. He was always willing to follow almost any direction that I suggested.

Blum: What did you have in mind as a direction?

Schweikher: I think my idea was to get a good project and do it very, very well, to try to find a good project. I don’t think I ever found exactly the project or having found a project that might have had promise I didn't always do either what I wanted or what the client wanted. And this left the thing in a sort of what I called then a ‘half-assed’ state. I could name some of those but I think I won't at this moment. There were good strong successes, too. There's no denying that we were an office that did small buildings.

Blum: Mostly residences?

Schweikher: Well, I suppose if you numbered them, yes. In dollar volume, no. We did our share. Of course I added some buildings then independently after dissolving the partnership that were larger, institutional buildings, some of them remained simply projects but they paid well. Those that weren't built did pay well, fortunately for me. I guess I began to see that I should make that a habit if I could. The expense of experimentation should be less mine and more the client's. Early on I was too inclined to do a lot of experi- menting at my own expense instead of having the client participate in those investigations.

163 [Tape 9: Side 2]* Information between asterisks was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes. Blum: What had your role been in your partnership with Ted Lamb and with Lamb and Elting?

Schweikher: Predominately design. Of course I participated in other aspects of seeing to it that we got into work, but design was my strength and my responsibility throughout.

Blum: Did your design responsibilities go as far as designing your partner Winston Elting's home in 1950?

Schweikher: Yes, I did that. I might add that this habit grew between us so that I was apt to do the design of all of my partner's work, whoever it might be, or at least to be strongly influential in it. * The above information was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes.

[Tape 7: Side 2 continued]

Blum: How do you remember Wynn Elting as an architect and as a person?

Schweikher: As a person I remember him as a pleasant, good friend. Matters of loyalty or serious personal conflict of any kind really never came up as far as I can recall. He was easy to accept as a friend, but annoying to try to evaluate and accept as a business partner. Elting, in my opinion, could drop a pencil at five o'clock without any concern and not appear again until around ten or eleven o'clock the next morning. I couldn’t do that. I still am like that I guess, I think my wife would say that even working as a one man band, if I get hold of a project and I want to work on it that the time of day really doesn't matter. Meals don't matter really, it's just something to be done, I suppose. It begins to even make my own household now become disjointed because I work overtime. I can work through the night if necessary and have done so nearly, although after eighty years it is a good bit more difficult to

164 go on a full all-night charette than it used to be. It was a common thing for me in our early days together, especially in our Roselle office, to greet Elting the next morning from the drafting table, having been there all night, and pleasantly so. It never really annoyed me. The only thing that annoyed me about Elting in the Roselle enclosure, which was a small drafting room and we were all aware of one another's going and coming, was that Elting, granted that he lived about forty miles away, made it an uncomfortable habit of leaving on the dot of five whether we were in the middle of a conversation or a problem solving activity or not.

Blum: In spite of these differences how did your office work?

Schweikher: I think I carried out all of the design and other responsibilities. A bill might never have gone out if it hadn't been for my nervousness about it. Elting was good if I were to have some kind of an argument or where things got debatable and arguable and where I might need an additional voice or where some additional energy was required to go see a contractor or go see a client. Elting was always happy to take on that kind of thing, which was usually the part I didn't like. I've always enjoyed architecture when my activities went between the drafting board and the building. When it had to take another side path and go through a client or through a stubborn contractor I was always glad to hand that to Wynn or to somebody else.

Blum: Who were the contractors with the best reputations in the Chicago area?

Schweikher: In our little work it was a man by the name of Edward Hawkins, he was out on the South or Southwest side, all the way from Downers Grove to Hinsdale and even to Elgin, almost as far as Lake Forest. In fact, including Lake Forest, although he did not do all that. The original reliable man was Robert Black. It was Robert Black because when I was with David Adler, Robert Black did a number of houses in, and around, or near, a number of the houses for David Adler. Adler, I think at that time, thought him to be a reliable man. I tried him once on the Voevodsky house, which was a rather

165 unimaginative house and very, very expensive. Black did nothing but help it be more expensive and that was the last that I ever saw of him. There's a little side story on Voevodsky. Their house was a rather ordinary design. Voevodsky had in mind some very conservative Russian architecture in which I guess the main quality was sturdiness. So, we built a brick and slate house for him out in the Libertyville section and he seemed to be very happy with it. Pussy's father, Russell, who was in the plumbing fixture business was only unhappy that too many Crane and Clow fixtures showed up in the house and he made that a point of strong objection, asking that we remove such valves and replace them all with Russell valves. This was too tedious and expensive an operation and Voevodsky wisely dropped it. Meanwhile, Mrs. Russell persuaded Pussy that Pussy should have her blessing. So she arranged an appointment with Pussy and me to attend a meeting in which she would criticize the house. Because George was a close friend of Charles Eliason's and other connections that we had at that time—this was all before Elting—I decided to accommodate them. About the only thing accomplished was a little interchange between Pussy’s mother and me when we entered the dining room. Pussy had already put some rare china and glass on enclosed shelves along one wall of the dining room and the only remark that Mrs. Russell would make was “Oh, what poor taste.” I said, “What do you mean by poor taste? The china or the cabinets?” She said, “The cabinets, of course. One doesn't display one's china.” My only response was “In what era” which ended the discussion.

Blum: That was a unique feature of many of your houses: open shelving in the kitchen and in the dining room. Why did you decide that open shelves were preferable to those with doors?

Schweikher: I don't know. I thought good china should be seen, that’s all. Some of it was worth looking at.

Blum: What about kitchen pots and pans?

166 Schweikher: In the kitchen it was a matter of utility. I thought that they should be available, and besides the fact was that well-chosen working stuff was handsome. The tools were handsome. This didn't mean all the tools that we had, because Dorothy was an economist first and an art-lover second when it came to the kitchen. So we didn't always have beautiful things ourselves. Some of my clients did and their kitchens turned out to be rather handsome. I noticed that this became, quite independent of me I'm sure, a habit not very long ago of domestic architecture. Some house designers—Jacobson and others—made quite a feature of kitchens. I don't think Mrs. Russell would ever have objected to my doing that in the kitchen. I could have shown anything I wanted in there but don't take it in the dining room. The dining room was probably supposed to be something like what you might find in the Louvre or at Fontainebleau or something of that sort when you went from one princehood to the next.

Blum: There are several other features that are unique to your early houses, for example in your own home, such as sleeping quarters that were separate from the dressing or closet area.

Schweikher: That came from designing for the rich I think. That was a habit that I got from working for David Adler. Did that came originally from the French? Maybe. The bedroom was invariably separated from the dressing room. The sequence was bedroom, dressing room, and bath in back. I did that whenever I could afford it or when my client could. I couldn’t afford it myself because I made our own bedroom in Roselle sort of a storage cabinet. It became a storage cabinet in the first place. It's almost happened here where the bed is at the end of the storage cabinet and then you go on in.

Blum: The beds are in a little alcove.

Schweikher: Yes. Here's a bed, and here's a bed, Dorothy always slept over here, then there's a window. Well, there's a big passage that made another connection

167 to the bath and initially it went outdoors. When our son, Paul came along and we built his bedroom, it was a very nice and easy addition to make. We hadn't really planned on Paul, but there he was. It was a wonderful place to put it, so that worked out fine. My bed, after I had built it to sleep in, continued down the rest of the way until it banged into the fireplace. You went down this other corridor that went straight to Paul’s room later. Then the corridor went on down into the main entrance hall and the living room. It's a nice logical plan, I think. Dorothy and I didn’t have the discomfort in it that we have here for example. This house annoys the hell out of me, too bland, too blank, too characterless.

Blum: Another feature in many of your houses is the bathroom arrangement: the toilet area is separate from the wash basin area and the bathtub. Why did you do this?

Schweikher: I thought originally to answer that by saying it was because of privacy. No. Privacy was not in my mind. I know now what was basically in my mind. I've always been on the point of trying to change the entire plumbing industry. I dislike and have a completely ingrown and never diminished dislike of all plumbing fixtures and particularly the toilet bowl. The whole expression of this particular human function as it resolves itself in a toilet seat is to me repulsive. Not that I think one should seek the utmost in comfort, probably the whole operation of going to the toilet should be done and over with as easily and quickly and as sanitarily as possible. However, in its at-rest state, its unused state, there is no reason why it couldn't take on a pleasanter appearance and not be made to look like the end of the bowels—it seems to be a white sculpture of the intestinal system. I'd like to see it as… Yes, I suppose it's natural to sit when defecating, or whatever a politer word may be, but we should let the toilet somehow or other return to at least a visually acceptable part of the architecture or even have a companion or a related use that is something that could be made more pleasant.

168 Blum: Did you ever try your hand at designing plumbing fixtures?

Schweikher: Not for the operation of the storage of water with a plunger to open a valve to cascade down a system of manufactured cataracts, no. But, going back to the old two- or three-holder days, yes. That would lead, I suppose, to chemical or electrical disposal of the feces, something that I still think is quite possible. Certainly it would be a savings in plumbing pipe. Perhaps ultimately it could get through with the argument in small communities, such as we live in now, where now there is a great ruckus over what we're going to do with the increasing number of contributors to the sewage system. It's going to have to be taken care of. We have up here a combination of aeration and chemical treatment that demands a lot of stirring and milling. It is probably not going to be allowed because it doesn't really take care of the effluent. The old bacteriaophage usage is probably satisfactory to some degree. But with this multiplication of people going to live every twenty-five yards from one another, it's going to become a great public nuisance.

Blum: As you resumed your practice after the war, when did you find that you were most affected by industrialization?

Schweikher: That's the kind of question that deserves a very careful and good answer and I don't think I have it because the scale of my work has always been rather small. When it came to institutional work where a great amount of mechanical equipment was required to make the building function, I think we sidestepped any strong industrial influence by yielding to the prevailing marketable item or to the prevailing engineering solution, mechanical engineering, structural engineering, electrical, etc. We simply provided enough space—I think many architects do this—to accommodate elevators, toilets, kitchen equipment, heating and ventilating, and cooling systems and so on.

Blum: Were there instances in your work were you were able or willing to

169 accommodate your design to include some ready-made item, be it a plumbing fixture or furniture or whatever?

Schweikher: There were at least two ways that we approached that ever-existing problem. If the budget was tight, it didn’t make sense to insist upon making manufactured equipment become a very definite piece of the architectural design by modifying that equipment in size, changing its location, or rearranging, for example, a complete duct system and so on. But without drawing that out, I should say that in general we assumed that the budget did permit it and we did make it a part of our architectural problem to design duct systems, registers, outlets of all kinds—electrical, motorized and so on—to coincide with, accentuate, or become subservient to the design, either at large scale or at close quarters, if that can be understood. Good industrial design in itself rarely solved the problem. I think it’s less and less true today, there seems to be more adaptability written into the efforts to accommodate architectural design than there used to be. There was a time when heating systems and electrical wiring systems and the equipment that they served were generally done in the fashion that the architect supplied in the structural drawings. He went away to do his own so-called designing while the industrial people simply moved in their diagrams and equipment, first in the form of diagrams and later in the actual installations. I don't know how many architects do what we did. It made it difficult, I suppose, to work with us. I can recall one instance—there’s no need to mention the kitchen equipment company because they turned out later to be very cooperative—when we appointed one of our people to this very task on the Duquesne dining system. This was in Pittsburgh. One man was assigned to the task of completing the kitchen equipment in the kitchen, in pantries, in the elevators and ramps, and continuous belt systems. He was to design them all in the spirit of the building. This meant sometimes complete redesign, not of motors, not of the interior guts of some of the mechanics, not of the generators nor of the cables, of course the interior of the cables, but redesign of the outlets and the fixtures. This all had to be custom work. It meant in the one case either

170 beginning the construction of these as custom work in the factory, accommodating designs furnished by us, or where it was possible taking a piece of existing equipment and cutting it and welding it and repiecing it and threading it to fit our design.

Blum: In December of 1946, when you and Elting had reorganized your partnership and began to practice in Chicago, Architectural Record published designs of four of your postwar houses. They look significantly different than your prewar houses. The style is less organic, more geometric, boxier. Would you comment on that?

Schweikher: I think the motivation was not always the same in each case. I can’t recall exactly the driving force for these designs. On the first page of the magazine there is a very rigid, rectilinear block, which was of course the choice. Here is almost an argument for the opposite of what I’ve just described in making custom work out of available industrial equipment. Here we were taking industrial equipment as an established constant and making a design with it and of it. The concrete block form laid up in these patterns is obviously something that preserves the form of the block in the same way, for example, that Mies in some of his early studies of brick structures for IIT kept the full brick. We tried to keep the full concrete block without cutting or splitting and not using the block as a backup for plaster but exposing the block as an architectural material in the design sense. The same thing applied in the number two house of that group, the one commanding a view of the river. It was a combination of brick and wood in which brick was indicated as the support while wood was adapted to the position of cladding but in this case without making wedge sections for the boards. These were flat boards turned at the angle—Wright had already done this a number of times—which then created an angle in the overhang.

Blum: How did the use of this material in this particular structure differ from the way you would have used the material prior to the war?

171 Schweikher: I don’t think there was any philosophical difference whatsoever. We were looking at ways in which one could use manufactured material boards in this case. One would assume other aspects of unrefinement, that is, when one says boards you mean rough sawn, with no planing and so on. We used the block as it came out of the mold, no hacking away at it with trowels on the job. This would tend to change dimensions; the basic design would be really not affected, although the end result might be. I think in these houses it did become something that was effective and pleasant and, most certainly as far as labor is concerned, probably labor saving. Perhaps even labor saving to the degree that it was more adaptable to being owner-built.

Blum: Do you think that design number one, which is quite boxy and geometric, is one that you would have done prior to the war?

Schweikher: Yes, if I’d thought of it. There’d be nothing in my philosophy, if you could call it that that would prohibit it. I think that would be part of my philosophy. Economy of means, economy of material, and so on has always been present and I think most architects share this. It’s always present in the mind of an architect as a prerequisite. Only when the problem says spend as much as you want or more would one try to find ways of making it expensive. It has never occurred to me to design in the effort of making something expensive in that way. You might make a space bigger but you’d use the same material, not cheaper material. The more money you have, I think my answer always was, the more space you can buy.

Blum: On April 28, 1941, Life magazine published a suburban house that you designed. Your design corrected some problems in existing houses, generally in suburban houses. One problem was that the living room and dining room faced the street. In contrast, in your design they are in the back of the house and facing the garden. Another feature that was objectionable was that the backyard was cut up by garages and various other structures. In your design the backyard is free from these structures.

172 Schweikher: That’s city architecture as opposed to country architecture.

Blum: Was the growth of the suburbs a big factor for your practice after the war?

Schweikher: For that kind of design? Yes, maybe this is a kind of antithesis or whatever you might call it. Maybe this is an opposite of what Lou Kahn meant when he said, “A house wants to be a street.” I think we always thought the house wants to turn away from the street and seek its own private outdoors. The old idea of the house in line with a group of other houses, under a beautiful row of tall, majestic elm trees, and with quiet, shaded summer walks and lawns and front porches where one could call across to the neighbor seemed to me long gone. I do believe that almost everything I have done, wherever it involved the town and the street, was designed with the idea that the street was public and that the house—in the Oriental sense and the French sense similarly—was to be walled off from the street. Once off the street, which was a traffic corridor, you were another person in many ways. On the street, you were bound for work or returning from work and you had the problem of transporting yourself and other people and goods. Your house, once you reached it, was to be a private place and even, god permitting, a safe place.

Blum: The Life magazine design cost $18,000 and incorporated many space-saving features. Did this type of design reflect your awareness of housing needs after the war that differed from housing needs before the war?

Schweikher: Not necessarily. Not in my mind. I think if I'd been asked that question back at that time my answers would have been unchanged for many that I had given before the war.

[Tape 8: Side 1]

Blum: You were one of three architects asked by Life magazine to submit a design

173 for an article on modern houses. The article appeared on April 28, 1947.

Schweikher: I think I have a slight idea about why we were selected but I'm not sure that it's accurate. We were three postwar architects, each of whom had served in some branch of the service. Not that we saw active duty on the firing line or in a fighting ship but we had served over this period when others were still at work in their profession. This must have been a sentimental reaction of Howie Myers, editor of the Forum, which was a part of the Time-Life- Forum group. I always regarded it as that. They may have meant to give some sort of explanation. Does the forward give any such key?

Blum: No, it had no explanation.

Schweikher: They probably felt that wasn't necessary. The only thing that I recall is that I wondered afterwards—after we got through with it, in the case of my own house—if they had any use for it. I called the editor. I should have gone to Howie Myers to see if we could purchase the model. The answer was, “You've already had your day in court.”

Blum: Was the model built in your office?

Schweikher: No, the model was built was by a specialist in model building by Time- Life–Forum-Fortune at their expense and with no holds barred. They designed it down to the last teaspoon.

Blum: Then you just supplied the design?

Schweikher: We just submitted the architectural design and then most of the furnishings, especially the built-in furniture. They did all of the design of any glassware, or cooking utensil and so on—anything else that made the appearance more realistic.

Blum: In 1948, you were a member of the International Congress of Modern

174 Architecture (CIAM) how did you happen to join that organization?

Schweikher: The only recollection I have of that is a telephone call from Serge Chermayeff in which he said, “We would like to receive your dues.” I stumbled a little bit and said, “Dues for what?” Perhaps I was not as abrupt as that. I don't think that Chermayeff had given me any kind of forewarning. Whether this was his manner or mild humor or what I don't know. At any rate he said, “Your dues for membership in the International Congress for Modern Architecture.” He said something such as, “You wouldn't object to joining it would you? You know it was a thing started by Le Corbusier and is still more and less under his guidance.” I said, “It sounds very worthwhile to me, of course. What are the dues? I'll send you a check.” I think Chermayeff was our Chicago and maybe even our United States representative. I had not met Chermayeff up to that time but we met later at the University of California in a psychological project that they had there. But we never clarified that point. We just talked about other things.

Blum: In what way did you participate in that organization’s activities?

Schweikher: Almost no way through any effort of my own. Giedion and others seemed to look at my work a little more closely because I appeared in one or two of those books and that's about all. I couldn't afford the time or the money to attend any of the international meetings as pleasant as it might have been. It would have been a great pleasure but I couldn't do it during those years, maybe later I could have done it. But by that time the interest in the Congress had waned and there was less activity.

Blum: In 1949 you built a home for Edward Bennett in Tryon, North Carolina. Edward Bennett was a Chicago architect who worked in a traditional mode. Why do you think he selected you, a modernist, to do a home for him at that time?

Schweikher: I think my first reaction was that his son Ted must have persuaded him.

175 Blum: Was his son affiliated with you at the time?

Schweikher: No, I think he was still a student at Harvard.

Blum: Why would his son have persuaded his father to use you?

Schweikher: Well, it was a possibility that he was studying architecture at Harvard and here was a local person that was beginning to build houses in that area. I get lost on any such analysis. It wasn't very long—it was either before or after or immediately in time with the talking about the house—that Ted Bennett came to our office to talk about joining us as a draftsman or even as a partner. We thought that he had had enough preparation and had enough interest and other virtues that we should consider him as a junior partner. I can't recall, I’d have to look up the dates. I can't remember just how the timing of his employment or his joining us fits in with the house.

Blum: How did your relationship with Edward Bennett, Sr., go regarding the designing of his house?

Schweikher: It was probably one of the smoothest of any I ever had. The senior Bennett, I think, made no suggestions at all except to have us visit this beautiful site in the Smokies so that we’d have a full sense of what it would be to live there. He told us how much he enjoyed the whole nature of living there and riding, especially as a thing for an old gentleman to take up or to revive, He gave us a clear idea of what his life would be like there in entertaining. It was to be a country gentleman's place, not too large, with room for a sufficient number of automobiles and later some additional stable space for horses. Then his wife talked to us at length, but she left him, as I recall it—it’s too bad Elting isn't alive to add to this—his wife left the whole architecture up to him. He made the decisions about accepting them. I think we simply went right straight to designs that appealed very much. I know that the house has a strong Wrightian flavor. I think we were all self-

176 conscious about that. I think we wouldn't have hesitated to write to Frank Lloyd Wright and say, “Apologies,” or “Hope you don't mind,” or “We mean it to be a credit,” etc., etc. We all meant it in good cheer and really as a complimentary effort. I think everybody felt that it was a success when we finished. To my surprise Julius Hoffman, I believe it was, in Stuttgart, was particularly attracted to it and gave it a lot of space in German publications. And there were other publications.

Blum: It was published in Architectural Record in 1952. The article said that Edward Bennett was his own landscape architect.

Schweikher: Probably, yes. And in my opinion he did exactly what we would have done. Perhaps he talked with us about it.

Blum: Did you ever function as a landscape architect for any of your projects?

Schweikher: No. The only action I ever had was to annoy the landscape architect. I can't remember talking to Bennett about his own house, I know that in the case of my own house I enjoyed the argument with the simple stuff that we did. I did the architecture half and Franz Lipp did the other half of it, the landscape part. I don't know whether he cared for what I did. I enjoyed every bit of what he did and what he did in modifiying what I had done. There was no quarrel there. In as much as Franz Lipp trusted me to stay in his house for about a week or so while he was in Europe, I felt that he probably must have trusted me in some of our projects. There weren't many. They weren't grandiose but there were a few small ones and we were always very happy with the work.

Blum: Was Franz Lipp the landscape architect you usually used?

Schweikher: As long as I was in practice in that area, yes. What I liked about Lipp was that in our effort to keep the architecture as a total down to the simple solution—simplify, simplify, simplify—we had asked Franz Lipp to follow

177 the same general principle. He added to that a rather sensible element, which was the use of directly growable and applicable things; a field of alfalfa could be as satisfactory as great rolling lawns and a good bit easier, perhaps, to maintain. That kind of thing. We wouldn't even hesitate to use a field of corn, things of that kind. The Chinese elm, except for the worms, was also an economical solution for beginning tree planting, and so that went.

[Tape 9: Side 2]* Information between the asterisks was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes.

Blum: You have a drawing dated 1949 for the Usonia Cooperative for Roland Watts. How did you come to submit drawings for that project?

Schweikher: I can't remember. I think the Usonia people simply telephoned or wrote asking if we would care to be included as architects. They named Frank Lloyd Wright as the supervising architect—I think that was to be his title although he would also design at least a circular house or two for the project.

Blum: What were the guidelines that you were to follow?

Schweikher: We were simply to give them some one, two and three bedroom houses from which to chose. The site was rather interesting in that it was one of Wright's devices of a set of tangential circles with roads winding in and around the peripheral lines described by the circles. The houses were to be located, as a general rule, one house to a circle. This may date back to earlier studies of the self-supporting house that Wright had made, very handsome rectangular solutions. Ours could have been circular if we wished, but I think it was up to us to choose what solution we wished to have. We based ours primarily on a short, simple statement of a two- bedroom house with this, that or the other addition to it, mechanical or otherwise. We then proceeded with preliminary drawings and Wright acted

178 as a kind of design umpire and a great many of the houses were built.

Blum: Was yours built?

Schweikher: We did, I think, two or three designs and I think at least one of them was built.

Blum: Did you work with Wright personally?

Schweikher: No. I recall sending him a full set of prints. One of our houses was rather crowded on the site for reasons not clear to me—I guess they were geographic or geological or something of the sort—and in order to adjust it to the site we were compelled to cut down on overhangs. I remember that our blueprint came back with big yellow arrows pointing to these rather small overhangs of four and five feet with the word “poverty” in Wright's handwriting. We did what we could, either to explain it or to change it, and the project went ahead according to whether or not there were available funds. * The above information was recorded on Tape 9: Side 2 of the Schweikher tapes.

[Tape 8: Side 1 continued]

Blum: What was your role in the fair in Chicago in 1950, for which you designed a house that attracted great attention?

Schweikher: I don't remember it as a whole fair, I remember only the house. In addition to my lack of memory about the fair I’m not certain about who came to me. It probably was the Structural Clay Products Company. We had used their brick in many of our houses and they came to me to ask if I would do a brick house. I think that was how that came about. I’ve forgotten the name of the man with whom we worked, we knew him very well at the time and he worked with me in providing the requirements, the program, for the house.

179 Blum: Who were the other architects who designed homes in the fair?

Schweikher: I don't remember any of the other architects. For reasons not clear to me at all, the only architect whose name stayed with me was Al Shaw. It was a house that I gave concentrated attention to, for a very short time. I think the whole project, as far as my work was concerned, was done in less than a week and I did preliminary drawings and I blocked out the working drawings and wrote the specifications and I was done with it. I think I only went to see the house once and that was when I was told that it was finished. There was one other action that I took when I was informed by someone that Marshall Field and Company had been awarded the furnishing contract. I called Field’s to ask what kind of furniture they planned to use because I had designed most of the built-in furniture and had almost completed the furnishing of the house. I saw very little use for the so-called occasional chair or easy chair, for example, and I said so. This was in strong disagreement with the person that was on the other end of the phone, who apparently had about the authority of a buyer. So, I stopped in to see him, bringing along an officer from the Structural Clay Products people who agreed with me that we should keep it to what I had designed. We got nowhere with Marshall Field’s and I let them know as much by probably one or two rather tart comments. Perhaps I couldn’t remember what I had said, but the next day there was a little squib in the Tribune about Schweikher being kicked out of Field’s department store.

Blum: Was this one of the issues in which you felt the AIA should have given you support?

Schweikher: Oh yes, it was. I think at that time I was still on the board of the Chicago chapter, and I felt that here was a good place for a little prompt action on the part of the profession as a whole to remonstrate or offer at least a strong objection to a department store stepping in and saying what it would do and what it would not do. Field’s must have been very cagey

180 about it, they must have had strong agreement with the Clay Products Association, and they were immovable. When I went to the president of the Chicago chapter he was immovable; he wouldn't touch it and told me to cool off, I guess. Well, I didn't cool off, but I left it alone. Whatever it was that Field’s did I never looked at carefully. The house simply had to suffer for it.

Blum: In 1952 one of the last houses that you did in the Chicago area before leaving for Yale was the Frazel house in Wayne, Illinois. The house seems Miesian in spirit. At what point to do think your style became Miesian?

Schweikher: I saw a lot of Mies in those days. He and I were together for brief visits, mostly at the Arts Club, short visits; we were constantly talking about architecture and certainly the main subject of refinement of detail and simplicity of plan and construction. That would be probably the extent of whatever there was Miesian, as you say, about the house. If it was Miesian it was an accident in the constant search for simplicity. I can't remember at all trying to follow Mies in any way other than that I was working with rectangles. My principle concentration was in trying to increase the importance of an indoor-outdoor relationship in which we introduced outdoor spaces into the interior of the plan; that was my principle concern. George Howe, who was beginning to visit me at that time in New Haven, seemed to like the house, I remember. He was there with Mies and me and we looked at the house together. Mies seemed to enjoy it. Howe said nothing at the time but some weeks later he said, “Paul, by the way, I enjoyed your house at the time. But why did you use a wood bargeboard as a cornice? I think that was a mistake.” I said, “George, what would you have used?” He said, “I would have used metal.” The only reason I mention this is that maybe I used the wood, which was certainly more difficult to control linearly than metal would have been, to take away from the most obvious endorsement of a Miesian derivation. I don't think I intended for it to come out so strongly Miesian. For example, the introduction of the softening effect of the latticework was something that I

181 enjoyed, it made the sun sparkle. The later introduction here or there of an Oriental stone lantern, such things as that, I remember those. And certainly there was the little basketry that the tenant used in the early stages of the occupancy.

Blum: Did Mies have a comment about the house?

Schweikher: No, I can't ever remember Mies making any such comment. The fact that he was there was enough for me; he was interested in going to see the house and it was his suggestion that we go there. Having done that I think he felt that he had expressed his pleasure, if not in the house, at least in a kind of endorsement I suppose of some of the things that I was doing. At least I always took it that way. He was very sparing about compliments, his presence usually indicated a kind of endorsement and I took it to mean that. To me he was always a great man and I took the lack of words frequently as difficulty in expressing himself properly—or perhaps satisfactorily to him—in English.

Blum: Did the fact that you both spoke German help you communicate with him?

Schweikher: Not much. I think we would have had trouble if we had both spoken English very well or German very well and had conversed. There were things said between us that had to do with statement and interpretation and then restatement and that's the way we talked. It was a somewhat clumsy way to talk but we rather enjoyed it. In the longer conversations, usually sparked with a martini or punctuated with a martini, I might have said we got along just fine. We seemed to understand one another very well. I think in later conversations with Philip Johnson he understood a good bit better—of course he had a command of the German language. No, I never had that. On the other hand, I did ask Mies once—I think I put it something like this, “It's your turn to learn English, not mine to learn German.” “Ach,” he said, “I once asked Rudolph Schwarz why he didn't learn English. Schwarz said, ‘As a born German, I have enough trouble

182 speaking German.’”

Blum: Did Mies go to see any of your other houses?

Schweikher: Not to my knowledge. We must have had many friends in common, but you know I was looking East for much of the time. Earlier, when Mies first began the house for Edith, I was probably one of the worst critics. I thought that the location was bad and there was a brief time when someone, perhaps one of my clients, came to tell me with some glee—and I seemed to enjoy it—that the floor of Mies' s house was under water. For some reason or other I thought that was quite fitting, but I never ever felt that I had to retract any of that. I simply began to learn who Mies was and what he had done. My German travels were not as informative in that direction as Johnson’s had been. I was impressed more by architects such as Van Der Vlugt. So, no, that's a long answer to a much simpler question. No, I don't think Mies did, although again I think it was enough that we met a great many times before he became very, very active in his building projects. We had enough time between us in admiring the work or discussing the work of other people rather than his work or mine. We talked about other architects and engineers and why they had done this or that and most of the time was spent in discussing the engineers who were leaping over vast spaces with curving arches and domes, that seemed to fascinate Mies at the time.

Blum: Who were the architects you were discussing?

Schweikher: I'd better not try to name them at the moment because their names don't come readily to mind. They were well known for the work that they were doing. That's a weakness of my mind at this point.

Blum: You mentioned that George Howe was a visitor to the Frazel house. He was then the chairman of the department of architecture at Yale and your immediate predecessor. You decided to leave your Chicago practice in 1953 to become the chairman at Yale.

183 Schweikher: Yes, at George's ceaseless persuasion.

Blum: What were your reasons for leaving Chicago to join the faculty at Yale?

Schweikher: Strange as it may seem from what we’ve been talking about, it was partly to help dissolve a partnership that was becoming more of a burden than a help. It was partly that and partly the challenge. I had been invited first by Harold Hauf to visit Yale as a critic. It wasn’t before Kahn was invited but before he put in an appearance. And for nearly four years I had been a visiting critic and I think the last two years of the visiting critic period Kahn and I came together, happily for me, as team teachers. We felt that our work together was effective. I think Kahn felt so, and I did. And Howe definitely did. He was convinced that we made a good team. I was acquainted with other members of the faculty. But of course in no way did our paths cross academically, so that there was nothing to build up for or against my going. It was principally an issue between George Howe and me and I had the endorsement of a great many of the students at that time. It was a time also, of course, for other people to be pressing me again. I had once been invited by Tulane and another time invited by the University of Illinois. Then just before Howe's invitation one came from Minnesota. The long deliberation made Howe rather impatient with me because I was trying to compare. I felt that I should make a change that would give me the opportunity to reorganize the office. I didn't want to give up the office, I did not want not to shake off, unfortunately as I did, some of the fine draftsman that we had, but rather to make a change in administration of the office. As I think back on it now, for good or for bad, at the time I felt that Wynn and I were not pulling together as a team, we were just associating.

Blum: Did you intend to keep an association with him on a loose basis while teaching at Yale?

184 Schweikher: No. Ho kept arguing that maybe that would be possible. There were two alternatives that would have fit into such a thing that many architects tried: an office in New Haven and an office in Roselle. But that had already been given a fair trial on the Vassar project.

Blum: With these several invitations on hand, you selected Yale. As you look back now do you think that that was the best choice for you at the time?

Schweikher: Oh, yes. If one reads Robert Stern's book, you might gather that it was doomed to fail because of my personality. Some of those found it an objectionable one in my reactions. That's very possible too. No one could be sure of that. There were many times during the three years as chairman of the department at Yale that I could have found solutions that would have brought me into a very happy relationship with everybody, but I would have had to yield some of my own personal convictions and I found that difficult to do so that became a quite free choice. I don't think I walked into something that I should have known better about at all, I don't feel that. I had plenty of friends when I left and could have stormed it through as it were. I was advised by many faculty members, Lou Kahn among them, that I could stay and should stay, but I chose not to. So no, I think the choice was right; there were friends everywhere and the promise was great. There were all kinds of goods things: as a place to bring up my son Paul, as a place to keep Dorothy's interest in the arts and so on, and let her express herself. We enjoyed those three years very much, except for the faculty ruckus. I enjoyed them enough so that I didn't do what Philip Johnson said, “Why don't you go back to your desk?” He said it in good spirits. I didn't feel that way. I was persuaded by Norman Rice at Carnegie Mellon to come there and our life in Pittsburgh picked up where the life in New Haven left off. We gained a set of delightful relationships and experiences and I never had to look back.

Blum: Would you be more specific about the Yale faculty problems?

185 Schweikher: I've been over that ground so much that the more I go over it the less clear it becomes. I think it was essentially over whether or not to support the work of a faculty member, Eugene Nalle, in the design area or yield to some of the faculty, though not all. I thought it was all of the historians, but it wasn't. But to yield to the opinion of one or two very influential people—not influential politically but just influential argumentatively—who presented a very good argument that too much of this one faculty member, Nalle, would be too much for the school. I felt that there was no risk involved in having this man take on a double duty which would be the risk of having the students of that period endure Nalle for two full years instead of one. The pressure was against having him do that. The reason I wanted him to do it was so that we could use his knowledge of what he was doing, which was really unique in studying basic structure as a part and parcel of the design process. I thought it might belong in the curriculum and the only way to find out was to try it. One or two of the history faculty felt that they could see that it was something not to be done simply by reason, maybe that's true. At any rate, they prevailed with the students and persuaded a number of students to react negatively. This began to coincide with what was coming in the student storminess that was about to go through the country.

Blum: Were you following Mies's method at IIT in your support of Nalle whose method was a practical and not a theoretical one?

Schweikher: Yes, in a way. I think it fits in with what Eugene Nalle was doing and in that respect it was similar in theory to what was going on at IIT. It was what has come to be called the hands-on technique. Mies's experience seemed to be in the area of rectilinear simplicity, masonry and regular masonry in the rectilinear sense. Eugene Nalle's experience was in the suspension of actual loads, some in tension, some in compression, and the resulting forms compelled by the action of the material.

Blum: Why did students find that objectionable if they were being trained as architects?

186 Schweikher: It was called child's play. Many of our students had their bachelor’s degree, a BA. It was easy to persuade a student that he was above that kind of thing. I felt that it was quite sophisticated and it was done by a very knowledgeable man who had technical skills of his own and who could have expanded into something quite exciting. It’s not that Yale isn’t doing exciting things now, I think it is, but it might have gone in a quite different direction and perhaps one with more meaning than what is being done there now.

Blum: Did you have the privilege of maintaining a practice while you were in New Haven?

Schweikher: Yes, I did. I always made that a prerequisite to any discussion about teaching.

Blum: Which project did you work on while you were at New Haven that satisfied you most?

Schweikher: It was probably Chicago Hall, the language building at Vassar. The one that Yale gave me to do had had groundwork that outlined a kind of structural bay and other such prerequisites that I didn't think were limiting at the time but turned out to be, well, rather stultifying in design. That was for Gibbs Laboratories, the science research building at Yale. It wound up simply as a corridor building and rather dull—useful to the scientists but dull as a building.

Blum: What did you try in the building at Vassar that was successful?

Schweikher: The Vassar building came from an interesting discussion, I think with Albers, in the matter of “interrupted patterns.”

187 [Tape 8: Side 2]

Schweikher: The pattern was that of two simple rectangular building and court units laid out in checkerboard fashion with interior space regularly intermingled with courtyards opened to the sky and enclosed by the adjacent building units. The structural system was made up of grids laid out to the alternating checkerboard of alternating spaces, open and closed. The roof of the building parts was covered with a system of barrel vault shells, undulating in the manner of corrugated cardboard where the curve of the shell formed the stiffener so that the roof shells acted as beams. These shells also formed a strong design motif. They were supported vertically underneath, as I indicated, by walls and by column and beam construction, all in poured concrete with fillers of glass or concrete masonry, as the general plan required. The interrupted aspect of the pattern occurred when two solid squares or two courtyard squares replaced the normal checkerboard pattern.

Blum: Was this the project in which spaces were deliberately left for sculpture?

Schweikher: Yes, I think that true. However, it was not as a requirement for completion, although I thought the building lent itself easily to sculpture and planting as an integral part—wherever they occurred they would occur as integral parts of the architecture. I haven't seen the building now in a number of years so I don't know whether the internal courts ever held any sculpture. They were frequently planted, however, with a variety of low and high growth planting and some had gravel in the Japanese fashion. The exterior had two or three pieces of very handsome sculpture, provided, I think, by the Glen Lloyds.

Blum: What was the material of the barrel vault shells of the roof?

Schweikher: They were reinforced concrete.

188 Blum: Was this the first time you used barrel vault shells?

Schweikher: Yes, it was the first time that I used it. But, it had been used industrially a good bit and on a much larger scale.

Blum: This device came into wider use after this time. Can you think of any projects by other architects that you feel may have been influenced by your work?

Schweikher: The one that comes quickly to mind is the Fine Arts Museum in Fort Worth. It’s beautifully done by Louis Kahn, with an emphasis on the related vaults and with a further refinement of daylight troughs at the crown of each vault—that is quite stunning.

Blum: Did your subsequent work after his Fort Worth museum ever pick up that feature?

Schweikher: No. There was no opportunity to do so, but that's an interesting question to me. No, I don't think I could have carried on beyond the Kahn building. I have yet to see the Kahn building in actuality but I have the catalogs on it and I think it is supremely beautiful. Even if I had had the opportunity to improve upon it I think I couldn't possibly have done so.

Blum: Was this the first time in your work that you used open work grids as a checkerboard plan?

Schweikher: Oh, yes, it certainly was the first time. It was a pleasant limitation on my part. Again, just as a quick reference to Kahn, my feeling is that his use of the vault was similar to my use of the vault but his planning was quite different and was based on different principles entirely. I enjoyed the limitation and the freedom simultaneously of that approach. If there's any question in your mind as to what Albers might have thought about it I don’t think I ever took Albers to the site. Whether he ever went on his own I don't

189 know. We never talked about the building. He was busy, I believe, at that time working with Breuer on Breuer's new project for the monastery.

Blum: Was Albers was on the staff at Yale at that time?

Schweikher: Yes, Albers had the same position at Yale in the school of design, which included painting and sculpture, as I had in architecture. These were departments then and he was chairman of the department. I was chairman of the architectural department. Kurt Canfield came, I think, originally as chairman of the drama department and then drama was made into a school and Kurt advanced in rank.

Blum: Did you have an opportunity to know Albers?

Schweikher: We knew one another as closely as any two people could, I believe that didn't live together. Dorothy and I saw a lot of Anni and Euppi—Josef—socially, professionally, scholastically, in every way. We talked a lot about the Bauhaus, about Yale, about art, and I was able to acquire a few precious Albers paintings and drawings.

Blum: How do you remember Albers?

Schweikher: I don’t have the adjectives that a writer would use to describe him. His personality changed with the event and the times. It was elastic in the sense he could be down in spirits and angry with his work—his own work as well as his academic work. Or he could be up in spirits if things went well, very angry, very happy, always amusing with anecdotes, strong minded, contemptuous of the work of others in many cases, positive about his own work and its direction and its certainty of endurance, of durability as an art, as a technique, as a concept, energetic, never forbidding, never too tired to talk, never too tired to see something, or to inquire about somebody else or the work of somebody else. He was always helpful, always interested in related professions, quite interested in the development of architecture, a

190 good advisor, a good counselor for me. He must have made a good husband to Anni because she had the same high esteem, the same high regard for him as his closest friends did. As a student and fellow artist, she produced some significant work of her own. Anni always added to any discussion that had to do with their history at the Bauhaus and she always had sharp, clear comments about the work at Yale. In Yale days there was a period in the morning, maybe three quarters of an hour to an hour, before lunch in which Albers and I frequently found it convenient to meet across from Street Hall for a beer. We used up perhaps half an hour to an hour a day in conversation that was always meaningful to me.

Blum: Did you find that the exchange between an artist and an architect in some way influenced your ideas about your work?

Schweikher: Yes. The only one that I think could be attributed directly to a suggestion on the part of Albers was the Vassar plan. He did recommend the young sculptor who did the concrete ornamented windows to the meeting room at Vassar.

Blum: Was the “system of interrupted pattern” a phrase he coined?

Schweikher: As far as I was concerned it was a phrase coined by Albers upon which he built a great many of his “no nudes” lectures. The students were preoccupied with the interrupted pattern search, producing some amazingly strong solutions.

Blum: Were there other faculty members with whom you exchanged ideas as you did with Albers?

Schweikher: Yes. There were many available and it's perhaps my own fault that I didn't speak more with others. This is complicated a little bit by the two phases of my so-called teaching or being at Yale. One is a period of four successive years as a visiting critic in which I was not a regular member of the faculty

191 but appeared periodically during the academic year for four consecutive years. Then there were the three years when I was chairman of the department. The first four years would have fit the pattern of a good bit more of free discourse and consultation with other members of the faculty, especially with the historians.

Blum: Would you name some?

Schweikher: Vincent Scully and Carroll Meeks were among them, and occasionally our planning man, Chris Tunnard. My brief period as chairman was somewhat cluttered by an unsettled feeling of strong differences of opinion between the architectural historians and some of the design faculty, especially in the first years—especially with Gene Nalle and some of his helpers. I felt that it was partly my duty—I guess that feeling was a part of it—but I think one or two of the historians and one or two of the design people let me know that it was perhaps my responsibility to straighten things out. I found this very difficult in that I saw value in what Gene Nalle was trying to do and I wished to support that while trying to sustain or win some acceptance on the part of the historians. This ultimately, I think, was a failure on my part and probably the cause of my lasting for such a short period. It would have been better if I had simply continued as a visitor. That's complicating a simple question. I was eager to converse with the entire faculty, individually and in groups. A good bit less of such intercourse took place because of this existing unrest.

Blum: As chairman of the department, were you obliged to teach classes?

Schweikher: I was not obliged but it was a part of my agreement with the dean that I would teach. It was part of George Howe's suggestion that it would be the reason for my coming to Yale.

Blum: Were you a good teacher?

192 Schweikher: I was a good teacher in my own opinion until I came to the end of that period and then I think I didn't do particularly well.

Blum: You have said that it was while you were a student at Yale that you learned how to be competitive. Is that one of the values that you feel Yale was teaching its students when you were there as chairman?

Schweikher: If I understand the question at all, I wouldn't say that it was just a value at Yale. I think that that was a part of the Beaux-Arts system. Competition was one of the elements of all of the projects issued in the Beaux-Arts programs. You are in competition with your fellow students at the atelier or university at which you were studying, but you were also in competition with other schools. These competitions were judged by architectural juries on the basis of competitions, and awards were made to the students, including medals, to the advanced students for premiated work.

Blum: But in the 1950s the Beaux-Arts system was no longer followed.

Schweikher: While the system ended, I think the feeling of competition remained. I think Yale continued its feeling of competition with other schools in the area, particularly in general in New England and ultimately across the country. It seems to me that that air of competition is particularly strong at Yale, which wants to be superior.

Blum: Would you compare, for a moment, the education you received as a student at Yale to the education young aspiring architects were receiving when you returned to Yale as chairman of the department?

Schweikher: It seems to me that the design teaching at Yale in those later days was not much different from the Beaux-Arts except for the change in subject matter and except for the fact that the Beaux-Art programs were based on rather large projects after passing through the “analytique” phase, the study of the orders. The projects soon became quite large—governmental office

193 buildings, institutional compositions, campuses and so on. Buildings and building projects as programs for design study were still in effect except that the grand schemes of the Beaux-Arts period had been pretty much dropped. Many of us in practice had felt that architects should be trained at some point in their college training and profession more in the use of materials and their effect on design so that they would understand what happened when you employed, wood, or stone, or ultimately the mixture of the two, or the use of steel and concrete and the reinforcing of concrete by metal and so on. We felt that there should have been somewhere a stronger drilling in the knowledge of the nature of such materials and in the application of them.

Blum: While you were chairman at Yale you were in a position to invite guest lecturers. You've mentioned Philip Johnson’s name off and on throughout our interview. Was he one of your guest lecturers?

Schweikher: Very frequently, yes.

Blum: Did you know him well?

Schweikher: I came to know him, but not in the sense of being acquainted with who he was professionally. I didn’t know him closely enough to know his personality, except as a businessman or part-time teacher. On such short notice, I don't recall. I can remember one phrase that surprised me and that he repeated two or three times in the days when I was there to listen to him. One was to discuss architecture in general or perhaps to discuss Mies and the work of Mies and certainly later to discuss the Seagram building. But two or three times he ended his talks—they would be informal talks out of the classroom, usually up in some bailiwick of a student’s up on Chapel Street or some such place—by saying, “Stand on our shoulders.” I guess meaning, to use us as stepping stones to your career. I didn't pursue that with Philip. He was a good talker, of course, as he is today in public and on TV, and a good writer. He knows what he thinks and he knows how to

194 express himself, which is more than most of us do as architects.

Blum: Who were some of the other architects or other guest lecturers you invited?

Schweikher: The names aren't going to come to me properly right now. We had people whose names are in the background now: the various heads of the architectural schools, Harvard and MIT; Gropius came, of course, two or three times during my period there; Mies van der Rohe; Richard Neutra; and planners, Edmund Bacon for example; and former critics and teachers, like Ed Stone.

Blum: Did you have an opportunity to know any of them more closely than as a visiting lecturer?

Schweikher: I knew all of them in the professional way, but not as close friends.

Blum: During the years you spent at Yale from 1953-1956 your work took on aspects that hadn't engaged you before, such as developing the University of Buffalo Master Plan. When did you develop an interest in planning?

Schweikher: I’m not sure that that question is pointed in the right direction. I really didn't develop an interest, it was thrust upon me in a small way. The small scale of the State University of New York, was an example in which, because of former Yale people I was invited to talk with the chancellor at the university about the need for a master plan at the university. This was at the time when it was still a semi-private institution. The chancellor was eager to go ahead with such a study and we made a rather ambitious and over-architectural study. A more skilled planner would have spent more time on the economics and related it more to the city than I could. On one or two other such plans in which we did just that, we called in planners as associates, and those were carried on in some of the small schools and universities in Pennsylvania when I went to Pittsburgh to become head of the architectural department at Carnegie Mellon. But nothing much ever

195 came of it. We worked with a number of leading planning people or asked them in as associates.

Blum: Was the SUNY Buffalo project your first effort at planning on a large scale?

Schweikher: Not exactly. We had had some government work just before the war. One of them was the Rockford development with Keck. I don't recall at the moment, but there were two or three others of a general planning nature, group planning, some of it private some of it public. But there was never a strong devotion to planning.

Blum: In December of 1954 Art in America published an article by Vincent Scully in which he notes changes in your style, such as we've talked about. He noted that your Chicago work was influenced by Wright, by Japanese features and then by Mies. But he notes that in your work of the early 1950s there was a new dimension, a formality in plan and an interest in the classical. The most important project he cites is the Maryville Chapel and Theatre. Were you aware of a new direction in that project?

Schweikher: Yes. I would simply refer to something I have said earlier in these discussions: my interest in the directions evident in Mies’s work, in which truly enough detail was important but the emphasis on simplicity was primary and seemed to me was almost synonymous with simplicity. That was the outcome of classicism in the work. Whatever natural trend I had toward romantics, they were suppressed in further institutional development by a strong reference to geometric control, regularity, and I suppose a somewhat classical result. I had consciously gone away from steel for a number of reasons having to do with the practicality of its use and the necessity of giving it some kind of fire protection; once started in steel you were almost obliged to continue the rest of the structure in steel or make transitions that were strongly effected by the use of steel. At the time I thought that if concrete was handled with discipline and restraint it could be a very important and perhaps one of the best of materials, especially for

196 large structures. I might say there that I began to discover that Kahn was well ahead of me in this kind of thinking.

Blum: That's interesting that you say that because I was going to ask you about two buildings you built on the Maryville campus; one in 1950, the Fine Arts Center in steel and glass, was very Wrightian, or was it Miesian?

Schweikher: Yes to both.

Blum: The second building on the campus, the chapel and theatre which Scully cites as being more formal in plan and classical in flavor.

Schweikher: Yes, it was. On the other hand you may notice that it also had an introduction of the corrugated roof in concrete using the short arch as a beam.

Blum: Would you speak a bit about how this Maryville project developed?

Schweikher: It raises the question, doesn't it, of why an architect would use two different directions of design structure on the same site? I don't think I have a good answer for that, it was a personal impulse I believe. I thought that the site could stand it or I wouldn't have done it. No one has ever really raised the question in an objecting or negative critique. I think I went in the direction of the concrete. I remember Scully’s short article and it was a perceptive one. I think he put his finger on a phrase in calling the chapel and theatre “stick” architecture. I was quite conscious of making sticks out of concrete and as a kind of future for whatever I was doing or would do. I liked the idea of pursuing concrete as a stick—the beam and column was really a simple static theory and easy to control. It had the same simplicity and ease of solution that was the nature of wood; you could get nice rectilinear sections in wood and you could do the same in concrete.

Blum: When did you develop an interest in concrete as a material?

197 Schweikher: Probably in and about the time of Maryville. I had used concrete, for example, in the Upton house in a different way. I would say in a rather sloppy way. In the use of stone concrete where large stones were used, set up in forms, and the concrete poured over them and then the exterior surfaces of the stone, inside and out, swept clean of cement so that you saw large hunks of concrete mixed with very large stones. This is a decorative use of concrete and not a properly structural use to my mind.

Blum: In 1956 you decided to leave Yale and took the chairmanship of the architecture department in Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon. How did you happen to select Carnegie Mellon?

Schweikher: Norman Rice came and got me and it was about as direct as that.

Blum: Was your arrangement with Carnegie Mellon the same as it was at Yale, that you could also maintain a private practice?

Schweikher: Yes. It was rather a tempting place to go because Pittsburgh seemed always on the verge of expansion and development, something that really didn't happen until many years later. It did look as though there would be quite a lot of work developing there at Carnegie Mellon, and at the University of Pittsburgh and at Duquesne University and of course commercially throughout the city.

[Tape 9: Side 1]

Schweikher: There was a housing need in Pittsburgh and we started a project while I was there in the later years, in the 1960s I believe it was. Through some kind of civic, state or national foibles it was abandoned. We had done a number of large housing studies that were never followed up.

Blum: Was the possibility of building in the Pittsburgh area a factor in helping you

198 decide to go to Carnegie Mellon?

Schweikher: Yes. That helped make the decision. It had been mentioned, both by Dean Rice and by President Warner, as attractive bonuses that would probably be available to me if I had the ability to get the jobs, and do the work.

Blum: How were you able to juggle your academic responsibilities with your architectural building activities?

Schweikher: I'm interested in that question. That seemed to puzzle the IRS also. They couldn't understand how one man could do two jobs. But so many people do that elsewhere for a variety of reasons I thought that the IRS should have had the answer long ago. It's not impossible for a man to handle two jobs and perhaps many, many more. I didn't feel that I was under any great strain, one does hire a few employees. Associates and partners can be attached to ones self, so that’s what I did. We ran a small architectural office, independent of the university, with the full knowledge of the university and with their cooperation wherever it seemed appropriate. Also, it was possible to interchange our employees, some of whom taught at the university and some of whom studied in my office. It was a good arrangement all around.

Blum: Would you name some of your employees?

Schweikher: Well, there were many among them: Gerald Gurland, now a partner of Richard Meier; William Kerr, very successful in his own practice in Pittsburgh; John Fisher, who has already been dean of architecture at Syracuse, and who’s now practicing in California; Troy West, practicing in the East; Dell Highlands, who succeeded me as head of the department at Carnegie Mellon; David Lewis, who was a faculty member in planning, now a successful consultant and practitioner in Pittsburgh; and Jim Porter, an East Liverpool architect.

199 Blum: Were most of these employees or associates drawn from the student body at Carnegie Mellon?

Schweikher: All but two of those listed to this point were students. A number of those listed called on me recently when they attended the AIA’s annual meeting in Phoenix and they had come to receive various medals of honor.

Blum: I'd like to read something to you that appeared in the Yale Literary Review in September, 1966—it seems to be quite appropriate. “Many architects are teachers, whether they profess it or not. But often, those who profess it are thought of as teachers only. In the classroom the teacher tries to say what he thinks, but if he has built buildings they are often more articulate than what he says. Buildings say more than drawings, and drawings say more than words.” Do you recognize those words?

Schweikher: Yes, I wrote them. I must add a parenthesis to this: some of my architect friends were impressed by that quotation, but I have some friends who are also friendly with the English language and they felt that I had crucified it. It says what I was thinking: that as a teacher and practicing architect you influenced younger architects, just as you, as a young architect, were influenced yourself.

Blum: Perhaps a prime example of your influence comes to mind—it's a Chicago example—you built the Rockwell house for a young engineer who was so taken with the house and perhaps the process he observed that he went back to school and is today a practicing architect. When you were working on the H. P. Davis Rockwell house, before you left Chicago, were you aware of something like this happening to Mr. Rockwell?

Schweikher: Yes. I hadn't been until somewhere toward the end of the construction period Deever came to me and said he was giving up his own profession and going to study to become an architect. He said that he attributed it all to his experience with me in building his house.

200 Blum: Would you speak a little bit about the house itself?

Schweikher: Yes. The house, to me, is an odd mixture of the various attitudes that I had about wood construction, concrete construction, and steel. It has in it some of this orderly, rectilinear simplicity. But I recall, and I see in the pictures that I look at of it now, that we were almost obsessed with the idea of separating the view from the circulation of air from outdoors to indoors so that an accentuation, a constant repetition, was the appearance of louvered openings alongside or next to the glass apertures. I don't know whether it was a development from, or an improvement of, or simply another aspect of the louvers that appeared below the glass areas in the Lewis house.

Blum: You did the Lewis house in 1940. It strikes me as being rather similar to this house because the back of the house opens onto an interior court and the front is rather formidable-looking as it faces the street.

Schweikher: Yes. Well, that may be what's happened now by this time. Originally the house seemed sufficiently in the country so that the street-face had none of the importance of the corner-located Lewis house. We were really not so much turning away from as we were enclosing the surrounding area. That’s what the interior court and the little pool represent. Perhaps the dominant dictation here was the smallness of the lot as well, in which we had the feeling, I'm sure, that we should enclose whatever we could of the outdoors and protect it.

Blum: Well, apparently your solution was so effective that it really influenced the owner's life.

Schweikher: I think it influenced Deever very strongly. He was an expressive person anyway and I didn’t believe that he would change his own profession. I was surprised when he did, and, of course, happily surprised.

201 Blum:: Did he discuss that with you at the time?

Schweikher: Yes, a little. But by the time he did he was already so determined to do it. However, it wouldn't have mattered much whether I said I was for or against it.

Blum: Do other students or young architects who had worked for you stand out in your mind as having been influenced by your work?

Schweikher: Oh yes, frequently. John Fisher was one who many times made such declarations in my favor. John, as I may have mentioned earlier, was my partner on the Roosevelt Memorial competition and surprised me by his academic development as a dean of architecture. I may have mentioned William Huff—he was a student of mine at Yale toward the end of my visiting period when Kahn and I were team teaching. He was also a student of Kahn’s and later an employee of his. He had considerable Kahn influence. Huff was sort of in the wings when I arrived at Carnegie Mellon. He was there as an applicant for a teaching job. He simply was around and persistent. He knew me and for reasons of his own he didn't want, apparently, to ask directly to be employed, but he kept appearing day after day. It developed that we had lunch together and then we'd talk some more and I guess I asked Huff at some point if he would like to be an assistant in the department and he said, “Yes.” So he became an assistant design teacher in which he acted about as much like a student as a teacher but fell in with the teaching pattern at Carnegie very well, in my opinion. He went on to develop his own course and he stayed a number of years. We did have some difficulties—he was abrasive around the university and criticized the library and the librarian and then criticized a number of the scholastic approaches. He was so abrasive that he made it difficult for administrative committees to vote in his favor on advancement toward his tenure. After I left it seems that he had no strong champions so he left Carnegie and is now teaching and practicingin Buffalo. I think that he now has a full professorship and tenure at the State University of New York in

202 Buffalo and this is only about 1/100th of the mention that Huff deserves. He is a complicated, capable, intelligent, even brilliant man.

Blum: If you had an opportunity today to offer some advice to all the young men and women you've come in contact with over the years, either as a teacher or as an practitioner, what would it be?

Schweikher: First, I must assume that the question is asked earnestly, with a very real interest in the answer. My answer is that you should be very certain that you want to be an architect, be certain because of what you know about architecture. Learn by working in it if you can, learn by reading.

Blum: You were chairman of architectural departments at Yale and at and Carnegie Mellon. In your opinion did the architectural education at Carnegie differ from that at Yale?

Schweikher: Yes. The difference would be more apparent to the layman than to the professional. As I think further, probably the opposite is true: the difference lies in subtleties rather than in the general approach. They're alike in the general comparison; each one teaches something about engineering theory, looks historically at the great architectural composers, tries exercises in contemporary methodology, but each differs in detail and the application of these various facets. Some of them are subtle differences, some of them are basic differences that depend upon the academic strengths of the two schools. For example, Yale perhaps has a greater emphasis, for a very good reason, on history. One might add to that a great emphasis on scholaship as an accomplishment in itself, leading toward, perhaps, teaching in architecture rather than to practice. Carnegie lies closer to engineering theory everywhere, in all branches, stresses perhaps more acuity in structural engineering and what is available in and around the environment of Carnegie, the other engineering sciences. Now today, coming on strong particularly at Carnegie, there is almost total devotion to the computer. Yes, they’re different and perhaps from what I've just said they may be

203 drawing farther apart. Yale might go more and more toward the theoretical, although they're making quite a big exercise out of the outdoor experience of building small structures, with the students building at full scale. What value this has is hard for me to say at this distance.

Blum: While you were at Carnegie Mellon you were given an important commission at Duquesne University in 1962. You were asked to do the student union building and, almost at the same time, the university wanted you to approach your friend Mies to do the science center. Would you talk about that experience? How did you get that commission?

Schweikher: I feel that I need to say that my memory is poor about some things here, it’s undoubtedly evident. The man that was most active on the university side was a kind of advisor to the administration apparently. He played no prominent role in the development of the project once it got started, but he was responsible, apparently, for persuading the board of directors and the president in the selection of an architect. My own knowledge of my appointment as architect of the student union building came from Edward Marcus, who had been, up to that point, a member of my faculty at Carnegie Mellon. Ed was a student of mine at Yale and later worked as a team with Peter Mallard in making models of various projects that I was doing while at Yale, the Buffalo University campus for one. Ed had come to me to ask if I could use him in the planning section of the architectural department and I was pleased to have him. I think he, as happens sometimes in this combination of professional and academic life, stopped his immediate employment with me briefly for the experience as advisor in planning to Duquesne University. He then came to me to relay a request from the University to advise them about the architect Mies van der Rohe, with the idea that the university would consider commissioning Mies for the science building that they were contemplating and perhaps at the same time they would commission me as architect for the student union building.

Blum: Was your commission dependent on you being helpful in encouraging Mies

204 to accept a commission?

Schweikher: That was the implication. If I could get Mies then the chances were good that I would get the student union.

Blum: How did Mies receive the suggestion?

Schweikher: Mies never made it clear to me how he received it, but he replied positively. I think at that time Gene Summers was his voice and Gene let Marcus know that, yes, Mies would take the job. There was some comment made shortly after—whether it was Mies's own comment or Summers' comment I was never clear—that told Marcus that Mies would consider doing the science building. Summers got in touch with me. He and Ian Lee of Mies’s office came to Pittsburgh to talk with me. Marcus also introduced me to the university’s director of construction and I began discussions with the university for planning the student building while Summers began discussion with the university on the science building. We worked independently of one another other than that Mies was very kind. In the first place, Mies asked if I would take on some general role such as space analysis for the science building, while I was doing my own building. I was pleased to do that as his associate on the work. I couldn't reciprocate in that kind of course. Mies would feel that he should handle the whole thing on his building and he did. We began almost simultaneously; he began with his building as I began with mine. Marcus, for a while, was a kind of go- between. Still a third person came into it as the building representative, a young man, who talked to us technically. He was an information giver and seeker all at once; he was the one who helped us get in touch with all of those people who had done any planning up on this rock. It was a very complicated place because it was undermined with tunnels and had a variety of soils and so on. The big term in the Pittsburgh area is subsidence, so that was going to be one of our first major concerns and particularly so in our building. Mies's building was larger in area by far, but ours was vertically more complicated. We needed some six floors to accomplish the

205 program and Mies only needed, I believe, three.

Blum: The buildings are in very different materials. Yours is in concrete and his is steel and glass.

Schweikher: Mies and I talked about that a good bit; certainly Mies was not prepared to start, at that point, a concrete building. What more or less sealed his steel approach was that he had developed a way of doing an inexpensive first stage in which the interior of the steel was given the necessary minimum fire protection without the additional study necessary to represent the vertical members as carefully designed structural members. There was a kind of interior skin left off and so the exterior completed. This made it difficult for me to pursue the same solution in my own building because the nature of the building was different. We needed finished surfaces inside as much as outside, that was one thing. The other was that I found that mine was to be primarily a circulating building, the circulation of people was going to be a very important feature, and the handling of dining and the handling of meeting rooms and all the various activities was critical. There was a great amount more variety in my building than in Mies's laboratories and auditoriums. I remember Mies's attitude was, “Well, we'll do it and see how it works.” He was, in many ways, the senior. To that degree that was it; the difference was set and the difference was major.

Blum: Architectural Forum published an article on the Duquesne project in the July/August, 1967, issue. They noted that although both buildings are in their own distinct style a twenty-foot longitudinal section was used for both. Was that a deliberate attempt to make the buildings compatible?

Schweikher: I'm sure it was. Where it originated I don't know. I think there was a deliberate decision made there, now whether that was made by me after seeing the Mies structural subdivision or not, I don't know. I think it probably was because I can think of the person who might have made the suggestion, and that would have been Hanno Weber. It sounds like the kind

206 of thing that he might have suggested because the steel module was…. Now whether Mies had thought of this or not, and it's very possible he did, the steel module is very close to a most satisfactory concrete module for cross sections that would be manageable. This is a matter of compressive stresses and so on.

Blum: The article goes on to say that the university was making a deliberate attempt to unify the two buildings by landscaping an academic walk in front of both of them.

Schweikher: Yes, I suppose that's true. However, the evidence was hard to discover. Mies made one and I made one. Then each of us made a site study without going into too much detail because many of the old houses of early residents were still standing. There was a question of how many should be torn down and how many preserved and so on, so that these studies that we made were apt to vary a good bit in character and particularly in detail. General agreements began to form and we began to understand what the future of the campus would be. There were one or two commercial buildings that could have been and that were saved in order to be converted into academic buildings. And then a great amount of stuff was torn down. To what degree we could, we all cooperated in trying to make the campus as park-like, academically, as we could.

Blum: Were you satisfied with the outcome of the student union building?

Schweikher: I was quite satisfied, yes. There was some clumsiness in it caused mostly by our inability to carry on in some of the finishes. Some of the finishes were rather crude because we didn’t have the funds to refine them and they required that kind of thing. We didn't do them. We did the best we could under the circumstances with a very limited budget. I don't know what happened to Mies's building, I think it went all right too, but ours came right on the budget.

207 Blum: The building was obviously well received because Kidder Smith cites it in his book as one of the outstanding contemporary buildings and in 1969 the American Concrete Institute awarded it a plaque for Outstanding Architectural Design. Did you do many residences in the Pittsburgh area?

Schweikher: No. The only one besides the one for Dr. Craig Wright was the one for G. David Thompson, which was built in Maine.

Blum: The house for Craig Wright in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, has been described as “a house of boards done in a rigid, rectangle way but with a plastic relationship between the solid wall and the transparent reflective surfaces of glass. A kind of sculptural box.” This is how you described the house in Progressive Architecture in the November, 1967, issue.

Schweikher: I see it differently now, perhaps mostly in my mind's eye, as simply somewhat playful in the use of solids and transparencies.

Blum: The article draws references to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye as well as Marcel Breuer’s homes of the 1940s and 1950s. Was that again a new direction in your work?

Schweikher: It was unintentional if it can be described in the way it has been. It's not intentional, it doesn't annoy me. I hold both architects in very high esteem and am not bothered to have it look something like what they have done. I think what the contemporary comment indicates to me is that we're over- serious and over-involved in our analysis of some of the things that are done. It's a little more light-hearted than that.

Blum: How would you compare this house with your own home in Roselle of thirty years earlier? What do you think has happened to your direction during this time?

Schweikher: Odd little things have happened. We've found different ways—not

208 necessarily simpler or better—of circulating air, of adapting the inside of the house to the changing weather and climate outside. We've found different ways—again simpler perhaps, not necessarily better—of joining wood, of making sill details, of holding glass in a wood frame. These are all present in this house of Dr. Wright's.

Blum: The article says that the Miesian precision with which you handled the redwood siding does not announce “the balloon frame structure.” Isn't that different from what you would have done thirty years earlier?

Schweikher: I think that's possible, yes. Whether that's a fault or not I don’t know. Expressionism has disappeared in that sense, I think, from this house. The house is not expressing its skeleton; it is what you see, rather than what you know. Perhaps I should add that we yielded to new facilities, rightly or wrongly, on this small house. An example is that the new glues have changed possibilities.

[Tape 9: Side 2]

Schweikher: The boards are affected by weather and the changes in weather so that they can be handled as a plastic form. The importance of the expression of the skeleton seems to me to have been diminished, or if it is to be expressed it would be done in perhaps a more involved way.

Blum: Was it your desire in your Roselle house that the house be perceived as a whole at once? That seems to be one of your goals in the Craig Wright house.

Schweikher: That would have made, perhaps you might say, the house a piece of sculpture then. So, in a sense, I guess the answer to that, if it's applicable, is yes. There was an objective in this house verging on the playful.

Blum: Was that also true with your Roselle house?

209 Schweikher: No. I think that when seen next to the Craig Wright house the Roselle house was almost grimly serious. It's an earnest effort to let the house express its structure. I quite agree with the line of your questioning. The expressive structure in this building, which has almost the same structure—except for the weight of it, the actual physical weight of it—is different. This is a lighter framework. But the theory of the structure, the relatively light frame of regular vertical and horizontal supports behind the sheathing, is still there. The supports are lighter, there are fewer of them, and the framing is tighter and thinner and more plane-like than clapboard-like. That's probably why I called it sculptural. When I got through with it it seemed to have a plastic quality—whether or not that had virtue I wouldn't argue.

Blum: There seems to be a constant in every house you've done, from your first house in Chicago through the last house in Pittsburgh: you always use the natural material for its own qualities. Someone who was in your employ in Chicago suggested a reason: you have difficulty with colors. Would you comment on that?

Schweikher: What a gentle way to put it. I am color blind, not totally, but I do have trouble with color. Deliberately at one point in my drafting room I said, “Because I'm color blind we'll try this in a range from black to white through gray.” That also is not too informed a statement because it neglects to cover the difficulties that one may run into in the different hues belonging to gray, let alone attempting to approach black, so it doesn't quite work. Even so, it set me to rely more on the color, pattern and figure in natural materials rather than try and create my own.

Blum: From 1923 until 1953 you worked in offices and in your own practice. Then from 1953 through 1970 you were chairman of architecture departments in two universities, primarily in an academic position. Looking over the last fifty years, which part of your career has been the most satisfying for you?

210 Schweikher: Building buildings in the practice of architecture.

Blum: An activity that spans the entire fifty years of your career.

Schweikher: Yes, but to a lesser degree when I was teaching.

Blum: When you were in Chicago, would you agree that you were primarily building residences, and that when you were East your work was primarily institutional?

Schweikher: Yes, that was true. It was no search to make it that. The sequence of events turned out that way.

Blum: Do you consider your work in Chicago in the tradition of the Chicago School?

Schweikher: That's hard for me to say because I think I never took the time to understand what the Chicago School was. I don't think I read into the phrase “Chicago School” a positive, well-defined architectural design direction or philosophical direction. I began to form my own direction, with or without understanding it. I'm not sure now that there is anything that I, myself, am capable of defining that puts my work in line with whatever philosophy or philosophies existed in the Chicago School. Some of the phrases or descriptions that I've used here in this interview better describe my wavering, uncertain directions. I wouldn’t attempt to say that in any way I had in mind following or being directed by the Chicago School. I might add, as I think of it now, that I thought of the Chicago School, whenever I heard of it or was told about it, as a group of independent men struggling to do things in a fresh, new, vigorous way. I felt that we all had similar interests in searching for and finding new ways and also in finding new truths about architecture. To that degree we were perhaps all part of the Chicago School.

211 Blum: How do you regard your work in Chicago in the scope of your entire career?

Schweikher: I haven't tried to answer that question in my own mind very much. I think I'm honest in saying that the work itself was, as I've indicated a moment ago, an honest effort to bring a freshness to the whole process of designing a building and architecture—not by myself necessarily, but in sharing the move toward new directions with others. I think that I was also making some headway, or as the phrase might go, my contribution. Some of the things that I did that have stuck, as it were, are parts of a new direction; they are something in the nature of something to build upon or to develop, or use, or improve upon. In other words, being pertinent not impertinent. I'm not unhappy with what I've done, I wish I'd done more of it. I could have done more and perhaps I still will, who knows? As we talk I am about to explore a new commission and that’s welcome, encouraging, and pleasing. What direction it will take I don't know—maybe some of what I’ve learned will show up in it. If I haven't learned anything, there'll be nothing to show.

Blum: Of all the buildings that you've built, which ones do you think come closest to expressing who you are?

Schweikher: I have to divide that up into categories. There is the wood expression and the concrete expression and the steel expression, at least. I haven't made a soup of them all yet. Maybe that's a direction too…. No, it isn't. Meanwhile, I might say that I don't know whether I've improved in that direction because I feel that one of the most successful, still, was my Willow house in Roselle.

Blum: Would that be your wood expression?

Schweikher: Yes, it was. It seemed to handle the material most knowingly of anything that I did before or after. It was knowledgeable, it was plain spoken, it fit the site, adapted well to human use.

212 Blum: And the concrete expression?

Schweikher: My concrete work is probably best done at Duquesne, but leaves much still to be done by me in that direction.

Blum: And the last category, steel?

Schweikher: Steel, compared to Mies and others with longer and more involved experience, leaves me somewhat behind.

Blum: For those of us who might want to know more about your work, or see your drawings, or perhaps read some of your manuscript material, where are your records and drawings now located?

Schweikher: The manuscript material, such as there is of it in its more or less original form or manuscript form, is mostly, I believe, at Northern Arizona University in the research library. There is a little bit of it also at Syracuse University in their research library also.

Blum: And your drawings?

Schweikher: The interested researcher should be cautioned that some—a few rather than many—drawings were lost by fire. But the existing drawings are shared by the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago and by the Libraries at Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff.

Blum: Where would one find a photograph collection?

Schweikher: Photographs for the most part are shared by Northern Arizona University and me. It may be that the photographers themselves have some copies. Hedrich-Blessing would have the most. There are photos taken by Molitor, Orlando Cabanban, and one or two others.

213 Blum: In addition to what you have said, I have found information about your work published in architectural journals, both American as well as foreign, in books, and also in exhibition catalogs. Let me also mention the upcoming exhibition of your drawings at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago in October of 1984, for which a catalog will be published. Thank you very much Mr. Schweikher.

Schweikher: Thank you.

214 ROBERT PAUL SCHWEIKHER

Born: 28 July 1903, Denver, Colorado Died: 23 December 1997, Phoenix, Arizona

Education: University of Colorado, Boulder, 1921-22 The Art Institute of Chicago, 1922-23 Yale University, 1927-29

Military Service: U. S. Naval Reserve, 1942-45

Professional Experience: Lowe and Bollenbacher, 1923-25 David Adler, 1925-27 Russell Walcott, 1928 Private Practice, 1930-31 Schweikher and Lamb, 1934-37 Schweikher, Elting and Lamb, 1937-42 Schweikher and Elting, 1945-53 Private Practice, 1953 -70

Teaching Experience: Head, Chicago School of Architecture, 1939-40 Lecturer, Art Institute of Chicago, 1939-40 Visiting Lecturer, University of Illinois, 1947 Visiting Critic, Yale University, 1947, 1950, 1951 Visiting Critic, Washington University, 1949 Visiting Lecturer, Arizona State College, 1949 Visiting Lecturer, University of Kansas, 1950 Chairman Department of Architecture, Yale University, 1953-56 Visiting Lecturer, Western Reserve University, 1957 Visiting Professor, Princeton University, 1960 Head, Department of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, 1958-69 Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University, 1969-70

Selected Awards: Second Place, A. W. Brown Traveling Fellowship, 1929 Matcham Traveling Fellowship, Yale University, 1929 Grand Prize, General Electric Homes Competition, 1935 Second Prize, House and Garden Competition, 1940 First Award, Church Architectural Guild of America, 1955 Citation of Merit, American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter and Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, 1955, 1960 Architect of the Year, Junior Chamber of Commerce, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1966 Artist of the Year, Arts and Crafts Center of Pittsburgh, 1967

215 Selected Exhibitions: Museum of Modern Art, 1933, 1944, Art Institute of Chicago, 1941 Yale University, 1947, 1969 Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 1949 University of Illinois, 1949-50 University of Kansas, 1950 Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1956 Princeton University, 1959, 1963 Catholic University, Washington, D.C., 1960 Architectural League of New York, National Gold Medal Exhibition of the Building Arts, 1960 Carnegie Institute Museum of Fine Arts, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1962, 1965 Harvard University, 1969 Arts and Crafts Center of Pittsburgh, 1970 Arizona State University, 1973 Graham Foundation, 1984

216 SELECTED REFERENCES

“A.I.A. Starts Atelier on Near North Side.” Chicago Tribune , 15 October 1939. Blum, Betty, and Zukowsky, John. Architecture in Context: The Avant-Garde in Chicago’s Suburbs. Chicago: The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1984. Blum, Betty. “A Regale of Tales: An Interview with Paul Schweikher Who Knew Just About Everyone.” Inland Architect 28 (November/December 1984):36-40. “California Charges.” Architectural Forum 62 (June 1935):42. “Central Court Adds Space to Illinois House for H. P. Davis Rockwell in Flossmoor.” Architectural Record 119 (Mid-May 1956):121-125. “Church: The Third Unitarian Church.” Architectural Record 80 (December 1936):442-44. Cohen, Stuart E Chicago Architects. Chicago : Swallow Press, 1976. “College Buildings: Chicago Hall, Vassar College.” Architectural Record 101 (September 1959):183-85. “Co-op Houses.” Architectural Forum 84 (January 1946):89-95. Cooper, William R. “Duquesne: Dramatic Change in Campus Scale.” Architectural Forum 127 (May 1967):78-85. “Country House in the Midwest for P. S. Rinaldo, Jr.” Architectural Forum 87 (October 1947):104-107. “Fine Arts Buildings, Maryville College, Tenn.” Architectural Record 110 (December 1951):101-102. “Four Halls in a Pavilion, A Complex Program for a College Auditorium, Theatre, and Chapel, Maryville, College, Maryville, Tenn.” Architectural Forum 104 (April 1956):148- 153. “From Practice to Campus.” Architectural Record 114 (August 1953):15. “Garden Courts Give a House in Wayne, Illinois Distinctive Character.” House and Home 10 (October 19556):131. “General Electric Competition Awards.” Architectural Record 77 (April 1935):279-81, 287- 90, 292, 315. Giedion, Sigfried. A Decade of New Architecture. Zurich: Editions Girsberger Zurich, 1951.

217 Gutheim, Frederick “After the Prairie School.” Inland Architect 29 (January/February 1985):5-6. Hamlin, Talbot F. “Three Churches.“ Pencil Points 21 (February 1940):78-79, 89. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Drexler, Arthur, eds. Built in USA: Post-war Architecture. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1952. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Johnson, Philip. Work of Young Architects in the Middle West. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1933. “House and Office Near Roselle for P. Schweikher.” Architectural Forum 86 (May 1947):57- 61. “House on Mountain Ridge.” Architectural Record 111 (May 1952):20-24. Huff, Darrell. “Getting Together Gets Houses.” Liberty. (2 November 1946): 17, 64-66. Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr. What is Modern Interior Design? New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1953. Keck, George Fred, and Schweikher, Robert Paul. “A Chicago Housing Project.” Architectural Record 73 (March 1933):159-63. “Kind of Sculptured Box: House for Dr. and Mrs. Craig Wright, Fox Chapel, Pa.” Progressive Architecture 48 (November 1967):106-111. McCallum, Ian. Architecture U.S.A. London: The Architectural Press, 1959. Mock, Elizabeth, ed. Built in the USA Since 1932. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1944. “Music School: A House and School of Arts and Crafts in Music for David Dushkin.” Architectural Record 77 (February 1935):83-85. “Previews of Four Postwar Houses.” Architectural Record 100 (December 1946):73-79. “Recent Work By the Office of Paul Schweikher and Theodore Warren Lamb Associated Architects.” Architectural Forum 71 (November 1939):351-66. Rogers, Meyric R. American Interior Design. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. _____. Work of Schweikher and Elting, Architects. Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 1949. Schweikher, Paul. “Architecture of Usefulness.” Yale Literary Magazine 135 (September 1966):21-29. Schweikher, Paul. “Thoughts on the Decay and Revival of American Cities.” Monthly Bulletin Illinois Society of Architects 24 (August/September 1939):1-2. Scully, Vincent, Jr. “Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture.” Art in America 42 (December 1954):250-61.

218 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

333 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Cabanban, Orlando 213 Illinois 8-10 Cable, Arthur G. (house), Hubbard 1260 North Astor Street, Chicago, Illinois Woods, Illinois 26-27, 38 58 Calhoun, Lucy (wife of William James) 1301 North Astor Street, Chicago, Illinois 120-21 58 Canfield, Kurt 190 Carlu, Jacques 13, 45 Abramovitz, Max 46-47 Carr, Capt. T. Dwight 98 Adler, David 14, 15, 16, 17-18, 19, 20, Cermak, Anton 137 21, 22-38, 39, 40, 54, 55, 92, 103, 142, Chermayeff, Serge 175 165, 167 Chicago Workshop, Chicago, Illinois 61 Ahlson, Frederick 14-16, 17-18, 25, 31, Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, Illinois 34- 34, 37, 38-39, 44-45 35, 102-3 Albers, Anni 190-91 Clow, William E., Jr. (house), Lake Forest, Albers, Josef 104, 107-8, 187, 189-91 Illinois 92, 142 Allerton, Robert 26, 38, 109, 121 Creighton, Thomas 79 Allerton, Robert (house, aka Monticello), Dillingham, Walter (house), Honolulu, Champaign, Illinois 38 Hawaii 21, 33 Allerton, John Gregg 21, 27, 33, 34, 37-38, Daley, Gardner 151, 153 51, 109, 121 Dawes, Charles G. 7 Art Institute of Chicago 9, 69-78, 180-81 Duquesne University, Richard King Mellon Arts Club of Chicago 97, 102-3, 104-10, Science Center, Pittsburgh, 157, 181 Pennsylvania 204 Attic Club, Chicago, Illinois 161 Duquesne University, Student Union, Atwood, Leland 20, 21, 22, 51, 53, 54, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 204, 213 59-61, 85, 109, 141 Dushkin, David 92-94 Dushkin David (house and music studio), Bacon, Edmund 195 Winnetka, Illinois 59, 62, 92 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 20, Dushkin, Dorothy 92 109-10 Barry, Scammon 133 Eich, George B. 25, 30 Bauer, Bertha (Bertie) 108-109 Eiseman, Al 15-16, 25, 37 Beatty, Hamilton 64, 67 Eiseman, Ferdinand 15-16 Beatty, Ross (Rusty) 111 Eisendrath, William 104-5 Bennett, Edward H. 102, 175-77 Eliason, Charles 63, 66, 68, 95-96 Bennett, Edward H., Jr. (Ted) 175-76 Eliason, Charles (house project), Chicago, Bennett, Rainey 76 Illinois 65, 86 Black, Robert. 165-66 Elkins, Frances Adler 24 Blair, William McCormick (house), Lake Elting, Victor (father of Winston) 156 Bluff, Illinois 25 Elting, Winston 35, 79, 97, 98, 100, 102- Bollenbacher, John Carlisle 11-12 3, 145-46, 160-65, 171, 184 Boulanger, Nadia 53 Euston, Andrew 48-49 Bradley, Bernard 101 Breuer, Marcel 190, 208 Faelton, Otto 24, 48-49, 50, 52 Farnsworth, Dr. Edith 111-12, 117-18

219 Farnsworth, Dr. Edith (house), Plano, Hawkins, Edward 165 Illinois 114, 116-20 Hedrich-Blessing 80, 213 Field, Marshall (house), New York City, Hedrich, Kenneth (Ken) 80 New York 24, 30, 34, 35 Hedrich, William (Bill) 80 Fine Arts Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 189 Heun, Arthur 110 Fisher, Howard 82 Highlands, Dell 199 Fisher, John 199, 202 Hitler, Adolf 94, 96-97 Fisher, Thomas and Page, Ruth (house), Hinkley, David 21, 22 Hubbard Woods, Illinois 84 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 58, 64-65 Fletcher, Sir Banister 40 Hoffman, Julius 177 Ford, Katherine 79 Hoffmeister, Theodore (Ted) 17-18 Ford, Ruth and Sam (house, aka Pumpkin Holabird, John 103, 109, 138-39 House), Aurora, Illinois 111, 113 Hood, Raymond 18 Frazel, Joseph (house), Wayne, Illinois Hoyt, Burnham (Bernie) 6-7, 181-83 Howe, George 111-12, 181, 183-84, 192 Fuller, Buckminster 53-54, 85 Huff, William 202 Fuller, Margaret 54 Fyfe, William Beye 77, 78, 91, 132, 147- Iannelli, Alfonso 148-49 50 Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan 120-21

Gabo, Naum 104, 107-8 Johnson, David 91 Garnier, Tony 40, 49 Johnson, Philip 18, 58, 64, 66, 90, 96-97, General Houses 82-83 112-13, 182, 183, 185 Giedion, Sigfried 175 Gillette, Bill 49, 51-53 Kahn, Louis 173, 184, 189, 197, 202 Glenview Cooperative Community, (aka Keck, George Fred 59, 61, 64, 65, 66-68, Redwood Village), Glenview, Illinois 85, 102, 128-29, 134 131-135 Keller, George (house), South Bend, Glessner, John H. (house), Chicago, Illinois Indiana 149 42, 150 Kerr, William Edward 199 Goff, Bruce 111 Kimball, William W. (house), Chicago, Goldberg, Bertrand 40 Illinois 42 Goldsmith, Myron 120 Goodspeed, Elizabeth (Bobsy) 105, 109- Lamb, Theodore 49, 50, 51-54, 70, 81, 110 87-91, 97-98, 103 Gordon, Elizabeth 151 Leavell, John 14, 21, 22, 23, 25, 32-33, 34, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White 11 37 Granger, Alfred 12, 103 Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret Granger & Bollenbacher 12-13 61, 175 Gregg, John see Allerton, John Gregg Lee, Ian 119 Gropius, Walter 61, 67, 195 Letarouilly, Paul Marie 40 Gurland, Gerald 199 Lewis, David 199 Lewis, Herbert (house), Park Ridge, Hamlin, Talbot 78 Illinois 78, 147-50, 201 Hammond, C. Herrick 102, 138-39 Lewis, Lloyd (house), Libertyville, Illinois Harris, Harwell Hamilton 90-91 124 Harrison, Wallace K. 47 Lipp, Franz 177-78 Haskell, Douglas 79 Lippold, Richard 51 Hauf, Harold Dana 184 Lloyd, Glen 188

220 Lockard, Norton E. 99-100 Nalle, Eugene 186, 192 Loebl, Jerrold 75 Nelson, Donald 13, 44, 45 Loewenstein, Richard (house), Highland Nelson, George 151-52 Park, Illinois 89 Neutra, Richard 195 Lowcraft, Thomas 46 Niemeyer, Oscar 47 Lowe, Elmo C. 11, 12 Lowe & Bollenbacher 11, 13, 19 Orr, Douglas 141 Lowe, Pauline (house), Altadena, Owings, Emily Otis (first wife of California 90 Nathaniel) 109 Lynch, Kevin 136 Owings, Nathaniel 74-75, 87, 140, 146, 160-62 MacCartney, Belcher 40 Maher, George Washington 91 Paepcke, Elizabeth (Pussy) 100 Maher, Philip (son of George W.) 51, 53- Paepcke, Walter 100 59 Page, Ruth see Fisher, Thomas Mallard, Peter 204 Parsons Atelier 14-16, 42 Marado, Chavez 157, 158 Parsons, Betty 105 Marcus, Edward 2-4, 205 Parsons, William E. 14-16 Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee Pelouze Building, Chicago, Illinois 75 196-98 Pereira, William (Bill) 101, 102 Marshall, Benjamin 10 Pereira, William and Hal 74 Marshall Field Garden Apartments, Perkins, Lawrence 83, 140 Chicago, Illinois 62, 63, 88 Perkins & Will 134 Marx, Lora 109, 110 Peters, Svetlana (daughter of Olgivanna Marx, Samuel 104, 106, 151 and Frank Lloyd Wright) 153-54 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 119 Peters, William Wesley 153-54 McKim, Charles F. 29 Pickens, Buford 57 McKim, Mead & White 29 Pond, Irving K. 103 McAnulty, Father Henry 114-15 Porter, James 199 McNamara, Father James 114-15 Pratt, Richard 21, 33 Mead, Margaret 81 Probst, Edward 11 Meeks, Everett 39, 42 Meeks, Carroll Lewis Vanderslice 43, 192 Rand, Sally 103 Mendelsohn, Erich 71 Ranney, George 58 Merrill, John 87 Reeves, Charles 26-27, 32 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 20, 22, 29, 48, Rice, Norman 23, 76, 78, 185, 198, 199 75, 89-90, 102-3, 105, 107, 109, 110- Rich, Daniel Catton 157-58 20, 142, 181-83, 194, 195, 196, 204-7 Richardson, Henry Hobson 8 Milles, Carl 142 Rinaldo, Philip and Gertrude (house), Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 100-2 Downers Grove, Illinois 127-28 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 100-1 Rivera, Diego 157-158 Molitor 80, 213 Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Monticello see Allerton, Robert (house) York 47 Morley, Sylvanus 156 Rockefeller, Nelson 47 Morton, Sterling 56 Rockwell, H. P. Davis (Deever) 200-2 Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Rockwell, H. P. Davis (house), Flossmoor, York 58, 64 Illinois 200-2 Myers, Howard 52, 79, 101, 150, 174 Rogers, James Gamble 24, 46 Root, John 101-3

221 Roullier, Alice 105 Thoreau, Henry David 142 Tigerman, Stanley 102 Saarinen, Eero 141 Tribune Tower, Chicago, Illinois 16-18 Saarinen, Eliel 17, 140-41 Tunnard, Christopher 192 Salerno, Joseph 77, 97 Turner, John 24, 25, 34, 37 Samuelson, Ted 21 Sandoval, Manuel J. 62 Upton, Louis 81, 99, 154-55 Schindler, Rudolph M. 63 Usonia Cooperative Homes, Pleasantville, Schlandermundt, Peter 52, 151-52 New York 178-79 Schmidt, Garden & Erickson 17 Schwarz, Rudolph 182 Van Der Vlugt, Leendert Cornelius 47, Schweikher, Dorothy 2, 6, 9, 19, 22, 45, 183 50-51, 60, 99, 102, 105, 107, 112, 114, Van Nelle Tobacco Factory, Rotterdam, 119, 120, 155, 158, 167-68, 185 Holland 47, 51 Schweikher, Paul and Dorothy (house, Vassar College, Chicago Hall, aka Willow House), Roselle (now Poughkeepsie, New York 187-191 Schaumberg), Illinois 72, 167-68, 208- Venning, Frank 11, 12, 13, 14, 23 10, 212 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 208 Scully, Vincent 20, 29, 41, 43, 141, 192, Voevodsky, George (house), Libertyville, 196, 197 Illinois 166 Seagram Building, New York City, New Voevodsky, Pussy (wife of George) 166- York 114, 194 67 Shaw, Alfred 74, 97, 101, 106, 107, 114, 137, 180 Walcott, Russell 19-20, 22, 34, 39, 51, 53, Shaw, Rue (wife of Alfred) 97, 104, 105, 54 106, 107, 110, 157-58 Warner, John 199 Shaw, Howard Van Doren 9, 10 Watts, Roland 178 Skidmore, Louis 87, 146 Weber, Hanno 206 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) 160, Weese, Harry 134 161 Weg, Talbot (Bud) 57 Smith, George E. Kidder 208 Weinberg, Robert 83 Spohrleder, Emil 126-27 West, Troy 199 Stanton, Louise (Mrs. Francis) 109 Will, Philip 83, 140 Stern, Robert A. M. 185 Willisch, Marianne 59-62, 72, 81 Stevens, Sheppard (Sheppy) 40-42 Womens Temple Building, Chicago, Illinois Stevenson, Adlai (house), Libertyville, 11, 13 Illinois 84 Work, Robert 34-36 Stoller, Ezra 80 Wright, Dr. Craig (house), Fox Chapel, Stone, Edward Durrell 151, 153, 195 Pennsylvania 208-9 Stone, John (house) Topeka, Kansas 150 Wright, Frank Lloyd 89-90, 112-13, 123- Straus Building, Chicago, Illinois 8 24, 150, 151-55, 171, 177, 178-79, 196 Structural Clay Products 72 Wright, Olgivanna 153-54 Sullivan, Louis 103 Wrigley Building, Chicago, Illinois 8, 110 Summers, Gene R. 119, 205 Wurster, William W. 23

Tavern Club, Chicago, Illinois 101-3, 109 Yale University, Josiah Willard Gibbs Third Unitarian Church, Chicago, Illinois Research Laboratories, New Haven, 91-92 Connecticut 187 Thompson, G. David 47, 208

222